Results: Battlefield 4

Welcome to the first review featuring Battlefield 4 performance figures. I played through the entire single-player campaign in one night to nail down the best possible repeatable sequence to use for benchmarking, settling on the Tashgar chapter’s introduction.

The good news is that we see some great differentiation and consistency between cards at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440. At both resolutions, AMD’s Radeon R9 290 shows up just under the GeForce GTX Titan and in front of GeForce GTX 780. Phenomenal for a $400 graphics card, right?

Our moment of pause comes from the retail 290X card we also tested, which turns up between the GeForce GTX 780 and 770—both of which cost less than the Hawaii-based board.

To AMD’s credit, both the Radeon R9 290X and 290 do appear better-suited to 4K gaming than the competition from Nvidia. Even the retail 290X pops up ahead of Titan once we measure at 3840x2160. It’s just unfortunate that frame rates are too low with a single card to make that resolution playable.

The first two frame rate over time charts show how well both dual-GPU cards fare still. The third reminds us why they can be a hassle: with no way to reliably benchmark them at 3840x2160 using FCAT, we leave their results out rather than posting Fraps-based numbers that don’t include dropped and runt frame data.

Although Battlefield 4 is the newest game in our suite, we observe fantastic variance numbers at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440. Ultra HD would be much more worrisome if the frame rates were higher.