Results: Ultra Quality, 1920x1080
Finally, we dial the detail preset up to Ultra for a better idea of how high-end graphics hardware handles Battlefield 4. In addition to bumping up detail, this setting enables 4x MSAA, deferred AA, and HBAO ambient occlusion.
The Ultra setting incurs a significant performance penalty, and while the Radeon HD 7870 and GeForce GTX 660 manage to stay above 30 FPS, their performance is pretty marginal at this preset. We suspect that our frame time variance chart may not be particularly friendly to either card. For now, let's have a look at frame rate over time.
Our contenders land in a pretty tight grouping. The GeForce GTX Titan, 690, and Radeon HD 7990 don't dip below 60 FPS, though again, we'd really like to look at these numbers from an FCAT-based perspective.
Clearly, AMD's Radeon HD 7870 struggles to deliver frames at a consistent pace, and the Radeon HD 7950 Boost has a bit of an issue, too. It's interesting that the Radeon HD 7990 appears to fare better than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 690. We cannot test this theory using FCAT due to the tool's 32-bit limitation, however, the Fraps-based data does appear consistent with our real-world experience. Nvidia's dual-GPU board felt choppier, despite its high frame rate. This could be attributable to its 2 GB of memory per GK104 GPU. But even the GeForce GTX Titan encounters some spikes.
