Battlefield 4 gives AMD hardware a performance boost

Battlefield 4 will be launching on 1 November 2013; just over four months away. The title will hit multiple platforms, heading to the PC, Xbox One and 360, Playstation 3 and 4 – and may be the best in the series thus far.

Battlefield 4 is also an AMD Gaming Evolved title and the game’s developers, DICE, have been working closely with AMD to get the game stable and running well on AMD hardware at launch.

While DICE hasn’t completely ignored Nvidia, it has not been demoing the game on Nvidia or Intel hardware. It has been recently confirmed that the game also runs on the latest version of Direct X 11.1 and this may mean that Nvidia will fall behind in the performance race. Nvidia’s Kepler graphics architecture reportedly does not support all the features in Direct X 11.1.

DirectX 11.1 will have less of a performance hit this time round and will support features that AMD will be able to use such as a dynamic GPU buffer and the ability to use system memory as GPU memory.

While DirectX 11.1 isn’t a prerequisite to play Battlefield 4 as the game can run the DirectX 11 code path, enabling all the features and eye candy would require one to move to Windows 8.

DICE have also worked with AMD to make the game more scalable with multiple processors, and may be the second title published by Electronic Arts to fully utilise AMD’s eight-core FX processors. Says DICE, “We use DX11.1 [and] there are some optimizations in it (constant buffer offsets, dynamic buffers as SRVs) that improves CPU performance in our rendering when one runs with DX11.1.”