My observations from testing some of this stuff below.

Running in admin mode does make ping show up.

I also have a mouse that detects when the game is running and changes the config (on the fly) to support gaming. I lose that when the game is run in admin mode.

Run the program as administrator to get network pings to show up. Not prefered but helps.


This is all from http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/448777.page


If your running an ATI card and you find BC2 crashes on startup (no error)
- Go to battlefield bad company\BFBC2Game.exe and right click -> properties -> compatibility and "Run this program as an administrator"


To get an ATI frames boost:
- Set Catalyst A.I to max


Decent FPS boost:
- Documents>BFBC2 and open up "settings"
- Change "renderaheadlimit" to 0 instead of 2
- This changes the amount of frames pre-rendered by your CPU for your GPU


Another big performance boost:
- Documents>BFBC2 and open up "settings"
- Change "HSAO=true" to false (also settable in the in-game "advanced" graphics settings)


Other settings.ini changes that you can try:
- Undergrowth=”medium” – Put this to low, if experiencing frame-rate issues.
- Water=”medium” - Map has alot of water? Drop the quality for fps gains.
- MSAA=”2? - This is Anti-aliasing, this will always use up a lot of a gpx cards resources. Set this to “0?
- Shadows=”medium”- You can also set this to low to improve performance
- Textures=”medium”- Setting this to low can improve FPS at the cost of visual eye candy.
- Aniso=2 - Set this to 0 to disable Anisotropic filtering.


To run DX9 for improved performance (this also stops random crashes for some people):
- Documents>BFBC2 and open up "settings"
- Add "DxVersion=dx9" to the list (without quotation)


You closed the PunkBuster agreement window and can't get it back:
- Head to Steam\steamapps\common\battlefield bad company 2\install\PunkBuster and re-install Punkbuster


To run the game in a window:
- Simply hit alt+enter and change your resolution to something smaller than your desktop.


For sticky/laggy mouse issues:
- Disable mouse acceleration in the game's mouse settings, and turn off Vsync in the graphics settings.


You can't look up-down and/or left-right
- You've accidentally bound something to the axes that BF2 uses for looking around.
- Reset your controls to fix this.
- In future, when binding things to your mouse, pay close attention; if you move the mouse at all while binding, it will register & bind that horizontal or vertical movement axes, replacing your look ones.


To enable war tapes audio:
- Change your audio setting to "war tapes" instead of "hifi"
An example of the change can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cFgWKEYC2g&hd=1