NVIDIA GeForce GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell Video Card Review

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. Battlefield 4’s single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China’s current government; and, if successful, the Russians will have full support from the Chinese, bringing China into a war with the United States.

This game title uses the Frostbite 3 game engine and looks great. We tested Battlefield 4 with the Ultra graphics quality preset as most discrete desktop graphics cards can easily play with this IQ setting at 1080P and we still want to be able to push the higher-end cards down the road. We used FRAPS to benchmark each card with these settings on the Shanghai level.

Battlefield 4 is more CPU intensive than any other game that we benchmark with as 25% of the CPU is used up during gameplay. You can see that six threads are being used and that the processor is running in Turbo mode at 3.96GHz more times than not.

Benchmark Results: In Battlefield 4 with Ultra settings at 3840×2160 we were able to average 33.78 on the GeForce GTX 980 reference card versus 30.07 FPS on the Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 reference card from March 2012 was having a tough time keeping up at 4K and averaged 17.8 FPS.

Benchmark Results: The GeForce GTX 980 ran BF4 pretty smoothly with these settings and if you reduce the image quality just slightly you’ll be able to get above 30 FPS most of the time at 3840×2160. We dropped down under 30 FPS in a couple spots during our gameplay, but for the most part we were above the 30 FPS threshold.