So, it is near the end of the year, meaning that we have the next
installment in the Battlefield franchise, namely Battlefield 1, which
is actually the fifth g 8th, 12th, 240,
I I don't know. Anyways, wacky naming convention aside, Battlefield 1 is a
hyped enough game that it might actually get you thinking about upgrading your
current system. It's absolutely beautiful. So, what hardware combo
should you be looking at? Let's find out in our Battlefield 1 video card showdown
featuring CPU cores and memory and like
some other
stuff. Tunnel Bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately
and enjoy a more open internet. To try Tunnel Bear for free, check out the link
in the video description. So, Battlefield 1, like I said, it's an
undoubtedly beautiful game, but what do you need hardware-wise to run it well
enough to make you feel like you're really in the thick of it, mustard, gas,
and all? We not only answer this question by looking at how it performed
on current GPUs like we normally do from AMD and NVIDIA, but also, like I said,
we tried different CPU core configurations and RAM setups as well.
And these benchmarks are what we'll be looking at first. For the CPU tests, we
paired Intel Skylake CPUs with the new Pascalbased Titan X or Titan XP from
NVIDIA, as well as 32 gigs of fast DDR4
RAM to ensure we wouldn't have any other bottlenecks. At 4K and the ultra preset,
pretty much every CPU from a 10 core with hyperthreading down to a four core
without hyperthreading performed more or less the same with the same average
frame rate hovering around 80 glorious
frames per second. It's only when we drop down to a dual core with
hyperthreading, something like a Core i3, that we start to see a noticeable
drop off. And a dual core without hyperthreading cut our frames by over
50%. So, the bottom line here is that any relatively decent and recent Core i5
with four physical cores should be just fine. We also took a look at the effects
of different amounts of system RAM. EA officially requires 8 GB and recommends
16. But in our testing with the Titan X and stuff to remove bottlenecks, the
game didn't seem to care whatsoever, even when we ran just 4 gigs of RAM. So
yeah, don't sweat it. However, if you don't have a ton of memory, you may want
to be careful about how many applications and browser tabs you have
going on in the background. And on the subject of memory, should the pretty
textures in Battlefield 1 compel you to go for a card with more than the
standard ration of 4 GB? To find out, we took two RX 480s, one with 4 GB of VRAM
and one with eight. Again, even on 4K Ultra, there wasn't any real difference
between them, even when we disabled the in-game VRAM limiter. So, we can't
imagine that 12 gigs of VRAM would be beneficial unless you're running
multiple highresolution screens or EA pulls modding support out of their
butts. We tested current GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA, but we also tested the
older GTX 660. That's the minimum
recommended card from EA. So, we'll see how well that works. Overall, the good
news is that while Battlefield 1 is a greatl looking title, you don't need the
best hardware on the market to run it. Out of all the cards that we tested, the
only one that wasn't really capable of running Battlefield 1 at 4K was the $115
Radeon RX 460. Everything else at least broke the 30 FPS threshold, though,
you'll want a GTX 1080 or a Titan X if you want 4K at 60fps, however crazy that
is. If you're more interested at hitting the 1440p sweet spot, your most
cost-effective option here is the $200 RX470, which hits 60 FPS on ultra
settings. And none of our cards really broke a sweat at 1080p, except the
affforementioned RX 460, which still managed a solid 45 frames per second at
ultra. If you want to break 60 FPS, you have to turn the settings down to about
medium, which still isn't that bad. Though, we did get strange artifacting
at medium and low settings on multiple resolution on multiple cards, both from
AMD and NVIDIA. So, only really use those settings if you really need to,
cuz I don't know what the heck's going on there. Speaking of 1080p, there's
good news. As long as you're not expecting to play the game at anything
higher than 1080p, the 660, which was a
very popular card for years, is capable
of running it, as EA claims, which is good. At ultra settings, we got 33 FPS,
though with some noticeable slowdowns when lots of explosion and whatnot were
happening on the screen. Bumping it down to high got us up to 40 FPS and made the
experience a whole lot better, especially during intense cutscenes. So,
that's where we'd probably recommend it if you're still using a GTX 660,
especially as that way you'll avoid the weird artifacting we got at those lower
presets. Anyways, moving on. If you've been waiting for a breakthrough DX12
game that really shows off the performance benefits of the new API,
you'll have to keep waiting. Our AMD cards performed virtually identical DX12
and DX11, while our NVIDIA cards actually got noticeably worse. The
silver lining here is that if you're not rocking DirectX12 compatible hardware,
you're not missing anything. So, there you go. Overall, I think EA's done a
pretty good job with Battlefield 1. All DX12 things considered, though, I wish I
could say the same about their Origin DRM, which locked us out countless
amounts of times from four different
accounts, including one directly from EA with an EA.com email address. What the
hell? This took us multiple days to benchmark compared to normally where it
would just take one little section of time. I also spent multiple sessions of
time working with EA support, hence the EA account that we had to test it with,
and our keys came from EA, so that we
could do this benchmarking. I like making these videos for you guys. I like
the idea of knowing what hardware I will need for my games. And especially in one
of these situations where it's coded apparently pretty damn well as it feels
like at least for DirectX12 where you have a beautiful game and you don't need
that much hardware for it. It would be nice knowing beforehand that you don't
need to upgrade your graphics setup or whatever else, but then this happens and
it's just
like Anyways, similar to what happened with Star Wars Battlefront, the
Frostbite 3 engine delivers impressive immersive visuals without really pushing
your hardware. As I just mentioned, all you really need is any modern mid-range
graphics card and a CPU that is has a
few cores and you'll be fine. Battlefield will play the way it was
meant to be. No SLI overclocking or bayonets required. Just hopefully you're
even allowed to play. So, we'll see. I'm going to go be salty
somewhere else and we'll just do the ad spot and move on.
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out. All right, guys. If you liked that video, hit the like button, get
subscribed, and comment down below about how much you hate DRM. If you dislike
that video, feel free to go ahead and hit the dislike button. If you want to
buy something like Battlefield 1, you can check it out in the Amazon link in
the description down below. You can also see shirts down there and some other
cool stuff. If you want to talk on the forum about how DRM is annoying as all
freaking heck, you can do that. That link is also in the description down
below and watch this video, which is our GTA 5 comprehensive performance
breakdown.