News - AMD spent as much as $8 million on EA/DICE Battlefield 4 deal

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Also the AMD Radeon R9 290X looks set for a 15th October launch.

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Read more.

I had a very quick go on the beta last night.
It made my system feel very dated for the 1st time, I'm hoping either nVidia or Dice come out with some optimisation updates.

I have to say it felt very much like 3 which isn't a bad thing. Although more destruction was possible, it was on the smaller things like iron railings and small outhouse buildings which didnt break apart in the previous version. Many larger buildings only broke in parts.

Looking forward to playing it in more detail tonight.

$5-8m ? Really ?

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Originally Posted by AGTDenton

I have to say it felt very much like 3 which isn't a bad thing. Although more destruction was possible, it was on the smaller things like iron railings and small outhouse buildings which didnt break apart in the previous version. Many larger buildings only broke in parts. Looking forward to playing it in more detail tonight.

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Thanks for that - I'm jealous. Then again, I thought the "feel" of BF3 was far in advance of that of the comparable CoD, and I claim to be a CoD fan! So if BF4 is actually "BF3+" (or "BF3S" for the iFans <grin>) then I'll not complain.

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Originally Posted by AGTDenton

I had a very quick go on the beta last night.
It made my system feel very dated for the 1st time, I'm hoping either nVidia or Dice come out with some optimisation updates.

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You could always upgrade your GF680 to a nice 7970 - with the Hawaii cards coming out the price of the "older" gear should fall. ;)
(I'm joking of course - you're right that it should work nicely with a 680)

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Originally Posted by crossy

Thanks for that - I'm jealous. Then again, I thought the "feel" of BF3 was far in advance of that of the comparable CoD, and I claim to be a CoD fan! So if BF4 is actually "BF3+" (or "BF3S" for the iFans <grin>) then I'll not complain.

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BF3 was spot on with most features and elements. BF4 has a hard act to follow. My worry is that BF4 is just BF3 with an improved engine and new maps... i.e. little incentive to move from BF3 if you own the premium edition. I'll hopefully get more familiar with it tonight.

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Originally Posted by crossy

You could always upgrade your GF680 to a nice 7970 - with the Hawaii cards coming out the price of the "older" gear should fall. ;)
(I'm joking of course - you're right that it should work nicely with a 680)

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Lol I've pretty much done what I can with this PC to speed it up without going the watercooled route, but I'm wasting my time and money with ageing components for gaming. The only thing I might consider is an additional SSD dedicated to new games. At the moment I've got SSD for OS and HDD for data because games are now so big, a 128GB SSD would fill pretty quickly.
The whole PC feels sluggish against an i5 Haswell PC I built recently for a fraction of the money compared to what I've thrown at this one over time.

why would dice `optimize` BF4 for NVidia? AMD paid for it basically ;)


if it is BF3 with a new engine , partial destruction on maps and the return of features they took out of BF2 to make BF3 (commo rose and commander mode) - they have a blockbuster winner.

For gaming you shouldn't mess about with a single SSD, buy 2 and set up a RAID 0 for double read/write speed as well as storage.

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Originally Posted by AGTDenton

BF3 was spot on with most features and elements. BF4 has a hard act to follow. My worry is that BF4 is just BF3 with an improved engine and new maps... i.e. little incentive to move from BF3 if you own the premium edition. I'll hopefully get more familiar with it tonight.

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As someone who has played their fair share of BF in the past, BF3 was full of broken promises, bad map design, and terrible community-developer interaction. I remember they promised a true successor to BF2, didn't deliver (Back to Karkand was horrifically optimized), promised a command line to remove blue filter, back tracked a few days later and patched the community's fix, promised an ingame VOIP solution, Battlelog VOIP does not count, promised on time and quick patches, the Dart took about a month or two to get fixed,and last but not least they promised PC would be the lead platform, rather they stuck to the console roadmap for updates which meant months between updates.

I'm not saying BF3 was a bad game, it just under delivered for the people who were super hyped about it. I spent about 600 hours in it and it was fun, my friends who aren't as devoted to the franchise quickly moved on which left a bad taste in my mouth as for the game. BF4 is much more fun. Domination is great for those who love twitch shooting while conquest feels more like it did in BF2. And yes, the current drivers are garbage.

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Originally Posted by AGTDenton

Lol I've pretty much done what I can with this PC to speed it up without going the watercooled route, but I'm wasting my time and money with ageing components for gaming. The only thing I might consider is an additional SSD dedicated to new games. At the moment I've got SSD for OS and HDD for data because games are now so big, a 128GB SSD would fill pretty quickly. The whole PC feels sluggish against an i5 Haswell PC I built recently for a fraction of the money compared to what I've thrown at this one over time.

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I share your pain - when I built the current rig I allocated a "massive" (famous last words) 256GB partition for apps and now I've got less than 40GB of that left - and still the vista of this years CoD plus BF4, (and I've gotta fit Rocksmith2 in there as well at some point). Luckily I found a 300GB 'Raptor the other day, so I'm going to move my partition to that to gain a little breathing space. Long term plan though is an SSD - especially as Crucial and Samsung can sell you a 500GB (approx) drive these days for way less than £300.
Decision then is SSD (plus a new one to replace my Vertex2E boot drive) or new mobo and cpu. (Of course, SWMBO may say neither - preferring to "waste" ;) the money on stuff like holidays and new cooker).

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Originally Posted by DeadllHead

For gaming you shouldn't mess about with a single SSD, buy 2 and set up a RAID 0 for double read/write speed as well as storage.

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I'll disagree - for me, the faff* with RAID setup etc just isn't worth the minor saving in loading times - yes, I'm impatient, but not THAT impatient! (Also seen a couple of TH postings that RAIDing SSD's can cause issues with their support software - so firmware upgrades and even checking status can be "iffy")

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Originally Posted by DeadllHead

For gaming you shouldn't mess about with a single SSD, buy 2 and set up a RAID 0 for double read/write speed as well as storage.

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Which would have no effect on gaming. A single, larger SSD is almost always better.

Seems pretty good - theres quite a bit more interaction with environments now, doors can be open, lifts used, shutters closed etc. Of course you can just blow stuff up too :) Seems quite cool, havent had a look at the advancement features, hopefully will improve upon bf2 ones. Do like in the tanks now, if you are second gunner, you can either be on the screen inside the tank, or pop out the top and fire hands on :)

$8 million for the deal, and as of the Beta - it still feels unoptimized. I'm getting only 30-40fps with my x6 1090T @ 3.5GHz, HD7950 3GB OCd and 24GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9.

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Originally Posted by LordReserei

24GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9.

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The funny thing is, even though the beta is 64 bit and one of the only 64bit game binaries available, it still uses less than 3GB which could have been provided by the LMA flag.

Large RAM sizes for games will still not be required for a LONG time. The 8GB in consoles will probably get half of it used for texture RAM, which most PC users have on their video cards.

Its a BETA its bound to have issues and bugs, The massive slow down experienced by everyone who owns a Nvidia card is nothing to whine about, its a beta for God sake. Man up. As stated by Dice they are more intrested in testing the back-end of the structure, Also remember this is an 'older' version of the Game that they are working on as stated in the page. Overall it was ok, but something was missing, there was no 'wow' factor. The hit reg was abit odd 50 mile shots and kill cam was sht.

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Originally Posted by Jace007

Its a BETA its bound to have issues and bugs, The massive slow down experienced by everyone who owns a Nvidia card is nothing to whine about, its a beta for God sake. Man up. As stated by Dice they are more intrested in testing the back-end of the structure, Also remember this is an 'older' version of the Game that they are working on as stated in the page. Overall it was ok, but something was missing, there was no 'wow' factor. The hit reg was abit odd 50 mile shots and kill cam was sht.

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the only problem is EA/Dice said the same for the beta of BF3 and they never actually ironed out half of the issues from beta, Lag, hit reg issues and so on.

I tried the beta and had five crashes going into game a crash as exiting the game Hit reg was poor Graphics Good, OVerall for me no improvement on BF3 so seeing as its £55 for premium i will most definitely be giving it a miss unless i get a free copy at some point with a graphics card

After the almost 2 weeks downtime that bfbc2 had and the poor making of BF3 I'd expect bf4 to be free or very cheap for people that have wasted there money on 2 and 3