AMD Offers Tips to Get the Best Performance in Battlefield 3 on AMD Hardware

In this guide AMD would like to offer some counseling around these topics. We understand that Battlefield 3 is not the only hot title this season, but it’s certainly one of the most demanding one in terms of hardware. Therefore we’re providing a little insight into what settings we think make sense for different levels of hardware.

In the chart below we identified some of the game settings for some different sets of hardware (CPU platform and graphics cards).

You’ll notice that we recommend the ‘Ultra’ preset in a few of our scenarios without the use of MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing). This is a traditional technique to remove aliasing from objects in the visible scene. It provides significant image quality improvements, at least in most cases. But because of its nature, working only on actual geometry, some objects will not benefit at all from this process, like foliage or fences, that are just textures, sprites etc. Luckily DICE implemented a new technique as well called FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing), which is a process that works pretty much on all objects. Another significant difference between the two is that while FXAA has a very small impact on performance, however using MSAA can essentially cut your framerate in half. Below you’ll find a few screenshots comparing the two techniques, where they’re effective and where not.

Note the difference on the left – the fence on the lower picture looks more cleaned up, whereas the images on the right will not show any difference in the fence quality.

As you can see in the highlighted areas the Image Quality has been slightly improved by using MSAA over FXAA. However again, there is a large performance trade off compared to using FXAA which can be seen via the FPS counter in the top right of the screenshots. Are the small improvements worth the large performance hit?

For these reasons we recommend not to use MSAA unless you’re running a CrossFireX™ configuration and really feel that the image on your screen contains lots of jagged edges.*

There’s a detailed performance guide that will be available sometime this week if you’d like get more granularity on the topic. With that, all I can say is happy fragging, and see you on the Battlefield!

* Disclaimer: The idea behind the following pages comparisons is not to discredit MSAA or the implementation of MSAA in Battlefield 3. MSAA is a wonderful technique that can be used to improve the image quality of your gaming. Users should be weary however that MSAA will not improve all objects in the game and comes at a high performance cost to the user that may not be necessary for someone looking to maximize their performance and gaming experience. It is highly recommended that users take time to toggle settings themselves and determine if the Image Quality improvement that MSAA provides is worth the performance hit their frames per second will take well gaming.

AMD Blog Post Author info:Antal Tungler is a PR manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions.