Battlefield 1 is launching in a week's time but you won't have to wait until then to see how well it performs on the latest Nvidia & AMD GPUs. If you've clicked on this then you already know what Battlefield 1 is and what it represents, so I won't bore you with a repetition of what you already know. instead, I'll dive straight into the benchmarks.

Nvidia & AMD DirectX 12 Benchmarks In Battlefield 1

The results you're about to see are courtesy of Hardware.info, who have conducted testing on 13 different graphics cards on the game's ultra and medium presets. They have also published frame-time results which you can find in their full Battlefield 1 performance review. We'll be following up with our own internal Wccftech lab benchmarks within the upcoming days. With that out of the way, let's dig in.

Source : Hardware.info

Right off the bat the game is very clearly well optimized. At 1080p you can get away with a four year old Tahiti based graphics card like the R9 280X or a similarly clocked HD 7970 and get a mid 50s average framerate. With a tiny bit of graphics tweaking or overclocking you can easily push past a 60 FPS average. On the Nvidia side you're looking at similar performance to the 280X with a GTX 780. Which is a graphics card that was considered to be of a much higher performance bracket in its hay day. But it's clear that time has not treated it too kindly and it's now much closer to the much cheaper Tahiti based graphics cards.

Anything above the GTX 780 is overkill here, unless you plan on gaming on a high refresh rate monitor. In which case you're looking at 127 FPS with a GTX 1080 and ~115 FPS with an R9 Fury X or a GTX 1070. Right below the GTX 1070 we see AMD's R9 390X putting on a spectacularly good showing, outperforming the higher end GTX 980 Ti. Between a 90 and a 77 FPS average we see a cluster of graphics cards. Heading the pack is the RX 480, followed by the GTX 1060, R9 290 and RX 470. At the end of this little pack is the most popular graphics card out there, the GTX 970.

Source : Hardware.info

At 2560x1440 we see the performance hierarchy from the 1080p results maintained. The GTX 1080 is at the very top with nearly 100 frames a second. Following the GTX 1080 is the R9 Fury X and GTX 1070 with ~86 and ~83 frames a second respectively. The Radeon R9 390X maintains its extraordinarily impressive lead over the GTX 980 Ti at 78 frames a second and 73 FPS for the 980 Ti. Below that we once again see the same cluster consisting of the RX 480, R9 290, GTX 1060 6GB, RX 470 and GTX 970. The GTX 780 and R9 280X struggle to keep up here and are significantly short of the 60 FPS average we're looking for to maintain a smooth gaming experience.

Source : Hardware.info



At 4K no card manages to deliver a 60 FPS average however, the GTX 1080 comes closest with a ~58 FPS average. The R9 Fury X comes in at second with ~50 FPS and the GTX 1070 and 980 Ti both manage to stay close by with a ~47 FPS average. The R9 390X loses its lead over the GTX 980 Ti and falls into its more natural position within the stack at ~43 FPS. Our little pack of 480, 470, 290, 1060 6GB and 970 manages to deliver around a ~30 FPS average. Anything below the GTX 970 simply fails to deliver a playable framerate.

Battlefield 1 DirectX 12 Performance Per Dollar

The figures below represent the performance per dollar value for each graphics card relative to the GTX 1060.







Benchmark Run By Hardware.info

AMD's Strongest Showing Yet, Nvidia's DirectX 12 Performance Still Inconsistent

Before we wrap things up here I want to share some more results, this time for DirectX 11. The results are based on the work of our good friends over at GameGPU.com and for the sake of brevity we'll only be looking at 1440p. Although I should note that Nvidia GPUs exhibit the same behavior that you'll see below across all resolutions according to the data. All GeFroce graphics cards regardless of generation or architecture actually lose performance with DirectX 12 compared to DirectX 11 in Battlefield 1. Something we've seen before in other DirectX 12 games like Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

The chart above showcases the performance gains, and losses, in DirectX 12 compared to DirectX 11. AMD graphics cards see modest performance gains while Nvidia GPUs see a larger delta between DX12 & DX11. Although notably, with Nvidia, the delta represents a performance degradation rather than an improvement. This pattern was clearly present in the 1080p & 4K results as well. In fact the results overall in terms of gains and losses are very similar to what we have seen with Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

Hopefully Nvidia & the developers will identify whatever the culprit may be behind this bizarre behavior. In the coming weeks we expect to see game patches and day launch drivers come out to improve the game's overall performance beyond what you see today. Which, save for the anomaly above, is quite stellar broadly speaking.

Battlefield 1 is by far the most visually stunning and technically accomplished game that we have seen yet. The team behind the Frostbite engine has certainly outdone itself and every member of the team should definitely feel proud of what they have accomplished here. Battlefield 1 builds on the stunning graphics and sound engineering that we've seen with Star Wars Battlefront and manages to do it with impeccable efficiency. I can say with confidence that no game out right now performs this well for how good it looks. A few games certainly come very close, but Battlefield 1 has successfully anointed itself the new leader of the pack.