Battlefield 3 has been out for over a week now, and it has enjoyed easily one of the most successful online FPS launches SA has ever seen. PC gamers have been spoiled with dozens of servers, most of which are either full or at least busy during peak hours. At 8PM last night I was able to count over 700 players spread across various servers, many of which are the highly coveted 64 player servers.

The PC version has been particularly well received in SA, and was sold out at the majority of retailers within the first three days of going on sale.

We recently published our review of the single player campaign, which failed to impress me much. Fortunately, having now sunk a healthy chunk of hours into the multiplayer portion of Battlefield 3, I can safely say I am very happy with what DICE has turned out.

Although bandwidth prices in SA have come down drastically over the past few months, data consumption is an important thing to consider for many when buying an online game. Therefore, we thought it pertinent to run some bandwidth tests and get an idea of just how much data an average play session will munch.

Using Bandwidth Monitor, we closed all none essential internet-accessing applications and ran Battlefield 3 for a number of hours, breaking them up into 20 minute sessions.

Over the course of three evenings each consisting of 2 hour gaming sessions, Battelfield 3 consumed a total of 255.6MB of data.

An average 20 minute Battlefield 3 sessions consumed the following:

Received data: 9.33MB
Sent data: 4.92MB

Total data: 14.2MB

In comparison, the tests we ran on Crysis 2 earlier this year turned out the following results per 20 minute game session:

Received data: 5.42MB
Sent data: 4.06MB
Total: 9.48

This makes Battlefield 3 one of the heavier data consumers among online games. Hype Gamez Technical Director Kim Attree pointed out during a recent interview that their own results from the beta indicate that from a hosting perspective Battlefield 3 is “one of the most bandwidth hungry games in memory.”

We’ll also be having a look at how much data Modern Warfare 3 consumes, so keep an eye out for our findings next week.

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