Intel CPU Scaling on an AMD Radeon HD 7950 Video Card
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 (BF3) is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released in North America on October 25, 2011 and in Europe on October 28, 2011. It does not support versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista as the game only supports DirectX 10 and 11.
It is a direct sequel to 2005’s Battlefield 2, and the eleventh installment in the Battlefield franchise. The game sold 5 million copies in its first week of release and the PC download is exclusive to EA’s Origin platform, through which PC users also authenticate when connecting to the game.
Battlefield 3 debuts the new Frostbite 2 engine. This updated Frostbite engine can realistically portray the destruction of buildings and scenery to a greater extent than previous versions. Unlike previous iterations, the new version can also support dense urban areas. Battlefield 3 uses a new type of character animation technology called ANT. ANT technology is used in EA Sports games, such as FIFA, but for Battlefield 3 is adapted to create a more realistic soldier, with the ability to transition into cover and turn the head before the body.
This game looks great and we tested with the highest settings possible. This means we used ‘ultra’ settings and really punished the cards being tested. We ran FRAPS for two minutes on the single player map called ‘Rock and a Hard Place’ for benchmarking.
Benchmark Results: We were surprised to see that there is almost no performance difference between the various processors. This would lead us to believe that high end graphics card like the AMD Radeon HD 7950 might still be the bottleneck at the ultra graphics settings. The variations that we are seeing are likely due to the AI changing in the scene, sometimes they threw out grenades, sometimes they didn’t.
Curious about the CPU usage in Battlefield 3 we opened the game up in a window and fired up the Windows task manager. With the Intel Core i7 2600K we could see the game accessing five of the processing threads consistently. Since the game seems to run across multiple threads we were a little curious about the game running on the dual core processors like the Intel Pentium G620 and the Pentium G850.
Running Battlefield 3 on the Intel Pentium G620 was definitely giving the processor a workout. The Pentium G620 was running at 95-100% from the point that we started the Rock and a Hard Place mission. The Pentium G620 was working hard, but it was able to keep up and we saw the same performance in Battlefield 3 as with the Intel Core i7 2600K!
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