Update:

- The article has been scrubbed of previous benchmarking data graphs following a point of contention by the source. More information on that can be found here - Besides the aforementioned update, the article remains as is. - You can find our own fresh set of independent Star Wars Battlefront performance tests and benchmarks here.



Benchmarks for the Star Wars: Battlefront BETA are in, incredibly well optimized across the board but runs best on AMD Radeon. That's what Star Wars: Battlefront has consistently shown in the latest benchmarks on both Nvidia GeForce and AMD Radeon hardware.

The game is absolutely beautiful and surprisingly well optimized for a BETA. In fact it's one of the best performing titles we've seen for the incredible visual quality that the game delivers in return, running far better than a sizable number of triple A titles, even though it's still in BETA.

With Star Wars Battlefront You Can Have Your Cake & Eat It Too - Looks Beautiful & Runs Well

The game is built with the versatile Frostbite 3 engine. The same engine that AMD and EA used to debut the first ever low-level API on PC, Mantle. Johann Andersson, Frosbite Technical Director at EA, was one of the very first to champion Mantle and the concept of low level APIs on the PC. He actually had a strong hand in creating Mantle and spearheading the push for Vulkan and DirectX12.

Considering the collaborative partnership history between himself and AMD on optimizing EA games, especially ones based on the Frostbite 3 engine, it didn't come as a surprise that Star Wars: Battlefront would run best on Radeon GPUs. However what did come as a surprise is how well the game runs in general, accross the board on a variety of hardware and resolutions. So if you had any concerns about how well this game will run on your system you should rest assured, this is definitely no AC Unity.

So let's dig into the numbers shall we, starting with 1920x1080, then moving on to 2560x1440 and finally 3840x2160. But before we do I'd like to give a shout out to the good folks over at Guru3d who have worked really hard to bring you these numbers, so please do make sure you go check out their full article here.

Star Wars Battlefront Benchmarked On Nvidia And AMD

System Specifications Hilbert Hagedoorn Guru3D.com :

Our test system is based on the eight-core Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition with Haswell-E based setup on the X99 chipset platform. This setup is running 4.40 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). We use Windows 10 all patched up. Each card runs on the same PC with the same operating system clone. - GeForce cards use the latest 358.50 driver.

- AMD Radeon graphics cards we used the latest 15.9.1 Beta driver.



Star Wars: Battlefront 1920x1080 (1080p) - AMD Radeon R9 380 2GB 61 FPS / Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 46 FPS

At 1920x1080 you'll want a $195 AMD Radeon R9 380 for a consistent 60 FPS experience. Unfortunately the price equivalent card on the Nvidia GeForce side, the GTX 960, is considerably slower at this resolution and only manages to achieve a 46 frames per second average, 15 behind that of the R9 380. Making this one of the bigger wins for AMD in the mainstream $200 segment. The good news is that a single $200 graphics card is all you'll really need to enjoy Star Wars Battlefront at this resolution. So even if you have something like a 3 year old AMD Radeon HD 7950 you'll be able to have a very enjoyable experience.

Moving up the GPU ladder we find a similar story at the ~$300 price point with the R9 290 edging out the GTX 970. Although I should point out that the R9 290 has been phased out and replaced with the slightly faster R9 390 which isn't tested here widening the gap in favor of AMD. Moving up again we find that both the ~$409 R9 390X and the $549 R9 Fury are ahead of the ~$479 Nvidia GeForce GTX 980. It's not until we reach the very top-end that we find GeForce taking back some ground with the $649 GTX 980 Ti outperforming the $649 R9 Fury X with a 114 FPS average compared to the Fury X's 109 FPS average.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2560x1440 (1440p) - AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB 61 FPS / Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 63 FPS

Kicking it up a notch by upping the resolution to 2560x1440 we see the gap between AMD and Nvidia widen accross the board in favor of the AMD graphics cards. For a 60 FPS average at this resolution you'll want a ~$300 AMD Radeon R9 390 graphics card, mainly because the R9 290 has been phased out as mentioned earlier.

Surprisingly for the same sort of performance on the Nvidia GeForce side you'll have to fork out $180 more for a GTX 980. Again we find that the ~$409 R9 390X is ahead of the GTX 980 while the $549 R9 Fury gets quite close to the $649 GTX 980 Ti and the R9 Fury X which are tied at 81 FPS.

Star Wars: Battlefront 3840x2160 (4K/UHD) - AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB 61 FPS / Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 63 FPS

Finally moving over to 3840x2160 we find that the gap again, widens in favor of the AMD GPUs here. However the first thing we notice is that the 2GB cards from both AMD and Nvidia are just unable to handle this resolution, simply because they've run out of memory as 2GB is simply not enough for Star Wars Battlefront at 4K.

At this resolution, not even the very top end $649 graphics cards are capable of delivering a 60 FPS average. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X edges out the GTX 980 Ti by 2 frames per second and the $549 R9 Fury matches the GTX 980 Ti at 43 FPS. Again the R9 390X edges out the GTX 980 and the R9 290 edges out the GTX 970.

For a 60 FPS average at 4K you'll likely want to go up to Multi-GPU CrossfireX or SLI setups. Based on the performance we're seeing, two R9 390 cards are likely going to provide the best FPS/$ solution here. Although without multi-GPU testing we can't say that conclusively.

So there you have it folks. All the benchmarks were conducted with all the graphics settingsset to "ULTRA" with anti aliasing set to "FXAA High". You can also take a look at some of Star Wars Battlefront's beautiful scenery in the gallery below.

