Powercolour X1950Pro
11. BattleField 2142
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The year is 2142, and the dawn of a new Ice age has thrown the world into a panic. The math is simple and brutal: The soil not covered by ice can only feed a fraction of the Earth's population. Some will live, most will die. In Battlefield 2142, players will choose to fight for one of two military superpowers in an epic battle for survival, the European Union or the newly formed Pan Asian Coalition.
Armed with a devastating arsenal of hi-tech assault rifles, cloaking devices and sentry guns, players will also do battle using some of the most imposing vehicles known to man. Massive battle Mechs wage fierce combat on the ground, while futuristic aircraft rule the skies. When facing one of these new behemoths, players will need to use their wits and an arsenal of new countermeasures like EMP grenades to level the playing field.
Team play features allow up to 64 players to enter the action on the front lines as part of a formal squad, or work behind the scenes in Commander Mode to direct the strategic assaults of their teammates. With in-game success, players increase their rank and unlock awards, including new weapons, medals and more, delivering the most comprehensive and flexible persistence in the Battlefield universe to date.
In order to benchmark the graphics cards, we recorded our own timedemo using the built-in command (demo.recordDemo). We then used Guru3D BF2 benchmark modified in order to support BF 2142. We used the following quality settings. Anti-aliasing is disabled inside the game, so we use Nvidia's 3D Control Panel to enable/disable AA/AF rendering modes:
Note that the 1280x1024 resolution is not supported in the game. However it can be enabled from the command line. All tests were performed at that resolution (1280x1024). Since the game counts all frames, including loading screens, we removed them so that all numbers represent pure gaming experience. Note that all tests performed at 1280x1024 were with the default camera view. Let's now proceed to the first test results.
At 1280x1024, EVGA 7950GT KO was the fastest card with 88FPS. XFX 7950GT gets the second place with 81FPS, while PowerColor X1950Pro was third with 70FPS, very close to Foxconn 7900GS.
Enabling AA/AF at Battlefield 2142 enhances visual quality and of course gaming experience. The PowerColor X1950Pro showed good scalability, and at 16xAF/4xAA was as fast as XFX 7950GT Silent. At 16xAF/6xAA had 48FPS, so you might use this as the default for your online battles.
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