As you know the BETA was not on DX11... It was on DX10 and the Alpha was actually on DX9.

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DX11 is supported by GTX470/80 and GTX5xx from 20-95.

The main difference between DX10 and DX11 is Tessellation which gives the models (Tanks, People, Trees) a more natural look. One other bonus is that it will run cooler and faster while making things look better. So More for Less...(Compared to DX10)


One of the most obvious differences between the quality levels is in texture detail. At Low Quality, the sign is barely readable. At Medium, the text becomes clear. At High, even fine details such as the bolts become razor sharp.

At Low Quality, shadows are not filtered, resulting in hard edges and saw tooth patterns. At Medium, shadow edges are smoothed out. At High or Ultra quality, the resolution of the shadow map is higher, resulting in detailed but smooth shadows.
These set of images show the benefit of high quality ambient occlusion. At the Low and Medium, the buildings lack proper self shadowing. High and Ultra settings enable HBAO, or Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion, a self shadowing technique developed by NVIDIA that's now used in various games. Note the detailed shadows under the windows and arches.

Optimal Playable Settings For Popular Cards

GeForce.com publishes optimal playing settings for all major games after launch and will certainly do the same for Battlefield 3 when it launches in October. For now, we've kept things simple and focused on finding the optimal playable settings for popular GPUs based on the game's quality presets.

To find the optimal playable setting, we toggled resolution and graphics quality until the framerate fell between the 40-60 fps range. We aimed for a minimum framerate of no less than 30 fps.

GeForce 8800/9800 GT 1280 x 1024 Low
GeForce GTX 260 1680 x 1050 Medium
GeForce GTX 275/460 1680 x 1050 High
GeForce GTX 560/570 1920 x 1080 High
GeForce GTX 480/580 1920 x 1080 Ultra
GeForce GTX 590/580x2 2560 x 1600 Ultra

GeForce 8800/9800 GT

We start the performance evaluation with the GeForce 8800/9800 GT—the most popular graphics card according to the Steam Hardware Survey and the GPU that is listed in the minimum system requirements of Battlefield 3. True to DICE's word, the GeForce 8800 GT does indeed play Battlefield 3, though at a humble resolution of 1280 x 1024 and at Low Quality settings. Needless to say, this is not how Battlefield 3 looks in the trailers, but the game does run, as promised.


GeForce GTX 260

The GeForce GTX 260 is the fourth most popular graphics card on Steam, used by 4.19% of gamers on the service as of August 2011. Though three years old, the card puts up a respectable performance. You can play the game at 1680 x 1050 at Medium Quality. As noted in the graphics quality section, at Medium, the game looks quite a bit better than Low but doesn't have the polish of higher quality settings.

GeForce GTX 275/460

The GeForce 275GTX or GTX460 give you that unique Battlefield 3 "look" while maintaining solid framerates. At 1680 x 1050, the card lets you play at High Quality settings, which gives you most of the graphical bells and whistles, including antialiasing, ambient occlusion, detailed geometry, and detailed textures. The GeForce GTX 460 performs very well at this setting.

GeForce GTX 560/560Ti/570

With any of these three graphics cards, you are getting a full Battlefield 3 experience. Simply put, this is 1080p at High Quality at 40 fps or more. With the GTX 570, you can bump individual settings a little higher (for example, Ultra quality Textures or Effects) or you can opt to play at higher framerates on the same preset. If your budget is more limited, the GTX 560 is a perfectly sound option.

GeForce GTX 480/580

For those who are lucky enough to own a GeForce GTX480 or GTX 580, expect a near-perfect experience. We're talking about 1080p at fully maxed out settings (Ultra). You have to hand it over to DICE for their lighting engine; at Ultra quality, the radiosity lighting, soft shadows, and ambient occlusion come together and play off each other to produce scenes so rich and nuanced that they look like they had been art directed. At this quality, the game plays like a trailer.

GeForce GTX 580 SLI / GTX 590

With two Fermi GPUs, the game plays at maximum quality but at the expanded resolution of 2560 x 1600. Needless to say, the game is startlingly beautiful. Do not show this to your console friends. They will hate you.


September 29, 2011

By James Wang

Today, the Battlefield 3 Beta will be released to gamers worldwide. For many gamers, the first question on their mind is: can I run this game? And if so, at what setting? This will be primary focus on this article. Along the way, we'll look at the graphics options offered in Battlefield 3, how they affect image quality, and the some upgrade options if you're looking to purchase a new graphics card.

A Quick Primer on the Battlefield 3 Graphics Engine

The last time a graphics engine or game generated this much discussion and anticipation was with the launch of the original Crysis. So let's take a moment to review why Battlefield 3 is such a milestone for 3D graphics on the PC.

Prior to Frostbite 2, DICE used two different graphics engines in its games.

The graphics engine behind Battlefield 3 is called Frostbite 2. Prior to Frostbite 2, DICE, the developer behind Battlefield 3, worked with two graphics engines. The first engine, the original Frostbite, was created for Battlefield Bad Company. Frostbite was powerful in handling dynamic destruction but lacked a detailed lighting model. The second was Unreal Engine 3, which DICE licensed from Epic for use in Mirror's Edge. Mirror's Edge was noted for its beautiful lighting which was created using offline global illumination software, but since everything was pre-computed, none of the levels were destructible. DICE's goal with Frostbite 2 was simple: to create a graphics engine that combined the rich, global illumination lighting of Mirror's Edge with the dynamic destructible environments of Battlefield Bad Company.

GI, or Global Illumination, refers to lighting models that capture the complex interaction of light as it bounces around in an environment. The challenge with Battlefield 3 was to combine GI with destructible environments.

With Battlefield 3, DICE has fully achieved this goal. The engine makes use of such a dizzying amount of technologies that we will be devoting a whole article on the subject in the coming days. But for now, suffice is to say that Battlefield 3 is the first game that successfully combines full destruction with realtime radiosity lighting, deferred rendering with robust antialiasing, and richly lit indoor scenes with massively scaled outdoor levels. There are other games that make use of one or more of these technologies but none that use all of them. And no other game has that unique Battlefield 3 look.


That Battlefield 3 was built for the PC is clear the moment you open its video options menu. Eleven graphics quality settings can be individually adjusted and four presets are available: Low, Medium, High, and Ultra. We will be publishing a detailed tweak guide when the game launches to go through each of the individual options. For this article, we'll focus exclusively on the image quality and performance of the four presets.