Good afternoon Bit-tech. I'm in the hunt for a new graphics card as my GTX 460 just isn't cutting it in Battlefield 3 the way I'd like. Budget isn't much of an option. Anything up to £300 is fine and going over would be acceptable if it was worth it. What would be the suggestions for a card suitable for BF3 at 1680x1050 resolution? I'm not biased in any particular direction when it comes to AMD or Nvidia. I'd just like to be able to hit high/ultra settings. BF3 is by some margine the most demanding game I own so if I can get that in check I'm laughing. As far as I can see the contenders are a GTX 560Ti, GTX 570 or HD6970. My gut reaction is the GTX 570 gives me a bit more wriggle room should I choose to update my monitor in the next year although its not an immediate plan. Any thoughts or does anyone know of direct benchmark comparisons between the contenders? The rest of the rig is a fairly standard OCed I5 2500k, 4Gb 1600mhz ram and the other assorted bits and bobs. I'd be interested to hear suggestions as most people seem to game at higher screen resolutions than myself thus reliable information is proving more tricky to find than expected. Regards. Tom
Get the cheapest 570 you can find Id avoid the 560's, many seem to be having stability issues with bf3 with factory overclocks not being stable.
I have a standard GTX 570 and it runs BF3 on high no problem, seen to cope with ultra too but i don't bother with it tbh. Your looking at £240 for one at Eclipse Computers! Sent from Bittech Android app
If you can afford it go with the 570 but the 560 could handle that resolution fairly easily I believe. I, for one, am not having any of the trouble that was mentioned with the factory OC on my MSI 570.
I'm in a pretty similar situation and would really like a benchmark chart for a few cards if anyone knows of any? I've got an o/c i5 750 xfx 1gb 4890 8gb 1600 xms3 But this brings me onto another question (or two)... Would having cards like our 4890 or 460 in SLi/xfire give good enough performance on high/ultra settings? Thus saving a fair amount of money. And does dx11 make THAT much off a difference? A screenshot comparison would be great, Tesselation seems to be quite good and is the only reason i'd opt for a new card over getting another 4890 in xfire... Thanks
I run the same res and pretty much the same spec (2500k, 8Gb ram etc) as you and I'm playing BF3 with everything on Ultra, AA off, anisotropic filtering at 8x, motion blur off (i don't like it) and SSAO instead of HSAO and its running brilliantly. I'm using a 5870 1GB so anything faster than that should be ideal at our res.
Hmm i have identical rig, but am wondering why you prefer to have AA off? I have an aversion to jaggies . . .
Save your money and get something just a little bit more powerful to buy you some time. I went from a 470 to a 460 and take it from me, the 470 is a beast of a card. You can get them for just over £100 on ebay, or here if they come up for sale (sold mine for £115). If a 560 can hit high settings in BF3, chances are a 470 also could quite easily.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ That's maintained by PassMark Software, and there are links to their other benchmark sites, for CPUs, HDDs, systems and mobiles. Each site is grouped into High-, Mid- and Low-Range, Best value, and a few others. There is also limited info on each item tested, and details of how the benchmarks are calculated, all to help make choosing easier There are, of course, other dedicated sites, I just mentioned the one I have been using recently
For performance. The first AA setting is off, the second one is one and I haven't seen any obvious jaggies tbh.
I've completed single player on my 4890 a few days ago but still haven't got any dam internet at my new place to check out how it copes/fails with multiplayer. I found this which might be of use... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063.html But it seems like there a load of software bugs/updates to drivers that needs to happen and as I don't have internet I can wait for some more benchmarks to come out. If you're in a rush then at our resolutions it seems that going AMD might give the best performance/buck but when you turn MSAA on they all nearly half in frame rate. (Hopefully they can fix this with a patch). Otherwise I've heard a lot of good things about the 480 or 560ti and they'd play reasonably well at our resolutions. Another thing to consider is that people are saying to get 2gb card for multiplayer because when **** starts to hit the fan on huge multiplayer maps, it needs the extra vram. Personally, I'm going to wait a few weeks for some updates to drivers and more benchmarks before getting a card but i'm certainly going to get a 2gb car or another 4890 in xfire and just run it in dx10.
Crossfired 6870's gets 115 fps average on ultra min is about 60! Edit: And they're the same price as a 570
