Battlefield 4 discussion..

[ZaO]

Just wondering if anyone here has made use of that new Mantle update amd and bf4 have put out? I must've misunderstood the write up on it. Because I thought it said it wasn't strictly for the apu's. And that you could use it if you had a HD7XXX card or newer? Maybe it's because I have an Intel cpu.. Anyone clued up on it?

[herulach]

They benchmarks show it on intel + R9, no idea about HD7X.

On a different note, the patch has also put the AS-VAL in, which I initially thought was crap, but is actually pretty damn good.

[kalniel]

Just wondering if anyone here has made use of that new Mantle update amd and bf4 have put out?

You need the new driver from AMD first (yet to be released), and a graphics card that uses GCN architecture. I think it's even currently limited to GCN1.1 cards, but GCN1.0 should follow them shortly.

[ZaO]

I'll wait for the next driver for my 7970 then and see what happens

Wasn't the AS-VAL already in the game? I've never really been keen on that gun in bf games, as it seems to lack a lot of damage power and really scatters the shots. Is it better in this one?

As for the state of the game at the moment - it's way better now. I stopped playing for ages because of the issues. There are still issues to be sorted out though. The main one I've been noticing is that you don't get the sound for when a locked on missle is flying towards you until it's literally just about to hit you. Even if you pop the flares at that point - it's too late. But the game is really way more playable and acceptable for me now. I might even consider that premium purchase after all Still can't see me preordering the next bf though haha..

[herulach]

I'll wait for the next driver for my 7970 then and see what happens

Wasn't the AS-VAL already in the game? I've never really been keen on that gun in bf games, as it seems to lack a lot of damage power and really scatters the shots. Is it better in this one?

As for the state of the game at the moment - it's way better now. I stopped playing for ages because of the issues. There are still issues to be sorted out though. The main one I've been noticing is that you don't get the sound for when a locked on missle is flying towards you until it's literally just about to hit you. Even if you pop the flares at that point - it's too late. But the game is really way more playable and acceptable for me now. I might even consider that premium purchase after all Still can't see me preordering the next bf though haha..

That's probably just the active radar, its op as anything. I'm a man dumper with decent recoil control so I find theasval pretty useful.

[ZaO]

That's probably just the active radar, its op as anything. I'm a man dumper with decent recoil control so I find theasval pretty useful.

I had to search that.. Active Radar Missles? I haven't used them yet.. Do they still work the same in HC seeing as the minimap and 3D spotting is disabled? They do seem quite over powered..

[chiok]

Does anybody know if Battlefield 4 plays better optimized on windows 8 then on windows 7? Last time I played was in the first month and people said the game played better on Windows 8

[MrJim]

Does anybody know if Battlefield 4 plays better optimized on windows 8 then on windows 7? Last time I played was in the first month and people said the game played better on Windows 8

This review on HardOCP suggests that Win8 does have a small performance advantage:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/...rmance_review/

[chiok]

This review on HardOCP suggests that Win8 does have a small performance advantage:

I wonder if this will soon become the norm, maybe into the 2014 that gradually most games will just become more better optimized for windows 8, and that battlefield 4 will just be the beginning of many

[herulach]

i got about 4/5 fps more moving to windows 8.

[MrJim]

I wonder if this will soon become the norm, maybe into the 2014 that gradually most games will just become more better optimized for windows 8, and that battlefield 4 will just be the beginning of many

It's difficult to say whether the improvement is due to the Win8 itself, or optimisations made to the game, graphics drivers, or a combination of the three. It's possible that slight improvements will become more common as developers refine their games for the newer OS. I don't think the improvement will ever be so huge that it'll make me rush out & buy Win8 though!

[KeyboardDemon]

I have been really enjoying this game, a lot more than I did with BF3, I think this might have more to do with my PC than the game itself as it runs so well on my PC now, but when BF3 launched I was having no end of issues, lots of stuttering due to frame pacing issues with crossfire, occasionally I would get a blackscreen appear which could last anywhere between a second to until the end of the round and sometimes I would get either blue screen errors or the game would just close itself with no reported error.

BF4 on the other has been playing very well for me, until last night when I had a random error and it reported something to do with a DirectX error causing my graphics driver to shut down, I really didn't read it properly, instead I restarted my PC, restarted the game and carried on playing.

Now in the cold light of day I want to find out more about what went wrong but I can't figure out how to find the reported error in Event Viewer, it might help identify whether the issue is game or PC related so that I can correct the issue or feedback to DICE.

Also on my other PC (FX8350, 8GB + R9 290X) I am getting random input lag issues. The game will play find for quite some time and then just randomly the keyboard and mouse will stop responding for a few moments and then all of a sudden all of the actions performed at the point when it stopped responding will just suddenly play like a script was recorded and it completing a list of scripted actions. Is there a fix for this?

On a side note I might install BF3 again to see how that works now.


*** update ***

I had a play this afternoon and got the error again, here's what the message read:

DirectX function "device->CreateTexture2D( &texDesc,desc.subResourceCount!= 0 ? reinterpret_cast<const D3D11_SUBRESOURCE_DATA*>(desc.subResourceData) : 0, &texture->m_texture2d)"failed with E-OUTOFMEMORY ("Direct3d could not allocate sufficient memory to complete the call.") GPU: "NVIDIA GeForce 780 Ti", Driver: 33221. Free virtual memory: 4291052560kB/4294967168kB. Total resource memory: 0kB. Make sure you have a supported graphics card with at least 512MB.

Does anyone have any ideas on what to do about this? Is it driver related? Hardware? The game? Origin? Alignment of the stars? I'm fairly certain my PC should meet the specs requirements.

[ZaO]

@KeyboardDemon - Out of memory errors are not that rare with this game. Yours looks as though it's specifically to do with the gpu. But you still might want to experiment with increasing your pagefile size. I say this because I have been on the OCN forums lately and there's a few people there that keep getting the "out of memory" issues. At least two of them have reported that increasing the pagefile size fixes it. Though one of them said their performance was a little worse after applying this work around. I think all these guys had 8+GB of physical ram as well. Other than that, it might be time for a routine uninstall/reboot/reinstall of your gpu drivers. It could just be an issue with them. One more thing to note (worst case scenario) - whenever I've had a graphics card dying on me, I usually start getting display driver errors to start with. Reinstalling them fixes the issues temporarily. But sooner or later it just becomes clear that the graphics card has had enough. Let's hope that's not the issue though! Just throwing it out there as possibility!

[KeyboardDemon]

Thanks ZaO, I hope it's not my GPU that's dying already as I've only had it for 6 weeks.

I have tried to repair the game through Origin and performed a fresh install of the drivers but now I'm getting a different error, this time it just says that BF4.exe had an unexpected error and then it shuts the game down.

[ZaO]

Thanks ZaO, I hope it's not my GPU that's dying already as I've only had it for 6 weeks.

I have tried to repair the game through Origin and performed a fresh install of the drivers but now I'm getting a different error, this time it just says that BF4.exe had an unexpected error and then it shuts the game down.

Not getting any errors with other games? I would find out where bf4 stores it error logging files. Make a copy of that and you dxdiag file and send it to ea/dice. They should be able to tell you what's up You could even post it here for us to have a look at while you wait as well. Someone might make something of it!

[Phage]

I get that unexpected error on my system as well. Only started after the last giant patch. Reverting to DX 11 has reduced the problem. I think it's a game issue.