Well it’s out and there are lots of reviews of this game so I won’t go into loads of details and I’ll keep this post short and sweet but with the amount of time I expect to end up playing Battlefield:Bad Company 2 I really thought it should at least get some kind of mention. With of course some fps information for a variety of hardware.

Introduction

For those who aren’t familiar with the EA Battlefield games, Bad Company 2 is just the latest one of many battlefield games. Like previous games BC2 has been designed with online multiplayer as it’s primary purpose and so although there is a single player game with a storyline this time round, it’s quite short and should be considered as a bonus game or somewhere, off server, to learn the controls. As you’d expect from the name Battlefield: Bad Company 2 it is a war game.

To sum it up in layman’s terms, you play the part of a soldier and as part of a team you run, drive, ride or fly around a battlefield trying to achieve your goal before the enemy team does. There are a variety of vehicles that you can use and numerous weapons and upgrades. One of the key features that draws the gamers to this game is the depth of the soldier rankings and statistics that are collected and retained for your logged in soldier.

One of the problems with a game like this is that the high quality of the graphics on today’s large LCD screens require a lot of computing power to play smoothly. Don’t let that put you off though as the upside of the high graphical requirements is that the game looks fantastic and is a real joy to play.

Required and Recommended Specifications

This game is available as a DVD from all manner of on-line and high street shops and it is also available through Steam. I personally buy from Steam as a preference although due to the offers available elsewhere that weren’t available on Steam I bought my copy of BF:BC2 from Game this time. Steam is however a great place to look for those hardware requirements lists, they are always complete and correct and well laid out.

As you can see from the Steam hardware specs this game requires some recent hardware to even pass the minimum spec. Interestingly the lowest graphics cards listed are the 256Mb 7800GT and the X1900 for Nvidia and ATI respectively. I would assume by X1900 that they mean any card from the X1900 range be it an XT or XTX etc.

As luck should have it I happen to have a 256Mb 7900GS and a 512Mb X1950pro in my spare parts store. So I’m in the fortunate position of being able to test both of these cards with a dual-core processor that meets the minimum hardware specs.

The recommended specs for this game are what you would have considered a high-end PC from last year.
A quad core CPU, I also have my 1gb 4850 and 4870 cards that I can run as single cards and a mis-matched, uneven crossfire pair. So a few useful combinations to test the hardware specs for Battlefield Bad Company 2.

To ensure accurate and comparable result data I decided to play through the first part of the single player game. Recording the fps with Fraps and logging the minimum, average and maximum fps for each run. I played through from the point where you take control of the character, through the trenches sequence and up the rope ladder. Once I reach the top of the rope ladder I stop recording the fps.

Running the game on EA minimum hardware

To start off with we’ll take a look at the game running on a minimum spec PC. As you can see my hardware for this test represents the kind of system that EA are considering to be minimum spec for Bad Company 2.

This is all running a fresh copy of Windows XP, as XP is probably what you’d be running on an older setup with one of these graphics cards. For both cards suitable drivers were downloaded from the respective websites (Nvidia and AMD) and installed. For cards this old the precise driver version is less important as the bugs fixes and improvements have been applied a long time ago.

For the low end cards I used the absolute minimum of in game settings, 1024 x 768 resolution, low detail and textures and with AA and AF set to minimum. This doesn’t produce anywhere near the graphical niceness of the higher settings but with a low end card this is the best you can hope for I’m afraid.

From these tests it’s clear that the 512Mb X1950pro is the better card for playing Bad Company 2 and this is probably due to the extra memory onboard as much as the actual graphics chip. From my experience of actually playing the game with both of these cards, I would deem the 7900GS as unsuitable due to the severe drops in frame rate to the minimum of 19fps. At low rates such as these the game appears to stutter badly and is not enjoyable. On the other hand the X1950pro coped well throughout the entire test and I was surprised that I saw none of the same stuttering as on the 7900GS when the battle heated up. Of course neither card would be able to provide playable frame rates on anything other than the minimum resolution and settings and it would be a huge shame to have such a beautifully crafted game such as this played in anything other than the best settings.

Running the game on EA recommended hardware

Having just mentioned that this is a game that needs to be played on the highest of settings to be fully experienced, I couldn’t go on without benchmarking these highest settings on some suitable hardware. It just so happens that I have a system that matches the EA recommended hardware of quad core CPU and HD4870 or GX260.

Having also retained a HD4850 I decided to test with this card too, it is after all a popular card that many people will have and of course my curiosity couldn’t allow me to run both the of these cards separately without then combining them in Crossfire. Having been previously unimpressed with this Crossfire setup earlier, I was interested to see what they could bring to the table in a newer game that might have better multi-gpu support.

For my testing of the high-end setup I put all of the graphical levels to high, maxed out the AF and applied 2xAA all at a 1650 x 1080 resolution. Unfortunately this is the highest resolution that I can test at due to monitor restrictions but it is also the most common monitor resolution amongst PC gamers. Obviously if you are playing at a higher resolution these fps results will drop down a fair amount on your setup.

As you can see the HD4870 performs admirably on the full settings keeping it’s frame rate above the desired 30fps at all times. This is a very good effort and I would be very happy to recommend these settings to anyone having this type of setup. Of course a 5000 series card, such as the 5770 would be a better buy if you were to buy a new card to play this game

I was additionally surprised by the Crossfire setup and might finally have found a reason to leave the HD4850 in alongside my HD4870 permanently. The minimum frame rate jumped up an additional third on the single HD4870 and the average frame rate an additional 50%+ which is a significant amount in anyones book. It may not be the full theoretical leap that crossfire could promise but it is far better than I had seen previously from this setup. At this resolution and graphics setting either the 4870 or the 4850/4870 crossfire setup will do a fine job and the graphical output as mentioned earlier looks outstanding. Take a look at the screenshot from the single player game below.

Conclusion

Well it certainly seems that EA/Dice have hit the specs pretty much spot on. One thing I do really want to point out again though is that the minimum hardware spec really is minimum and you wouldn’t want to play on these specs unless you really had to. At the other end of the scale the 1Gb 4870 will run the game how it was designed to be seen on the average 20 or 22″ monitor but without too many fps to spare. For a truly high end experience on a higher resolution monitor even the best PC setups available will be put to the test.

As for the game itself. It’s yet to settle down and I’m sure there will continue to be several more patches to fix a few minor issues but it’s certainly proving to be a fun and popular game. So far I’ve not seen a LAN option in the game, so I imagine for small scale LAN parties the only option would be to join a public server as a squad or two. Usually there are a few empty servers that would be suitable for a LAN game to join onto, of course a suitable internet connection would be required but then wouldn’t you want that anyway!

Just one think I’d like to request as a final note. Please can all players take note of the team balance and try to make the sides even. BC2 does allow you to switch teams much more easily than in BF2 which allows for playing alongside your friends, however everyone needs to be sensible and self regulate the teams too.

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