Battlefield 4 discussion..

[ZaO]

I searched and didn't see a thread like this already going. Since the Beta test is only about 5-6 weeks away, I thought it'd be a good time to start speculating about the game and some realistic pc hardware requirements!

I did a little searching and it seems that there are no official requirements out for the game. We all know that official recommended requirements are all lies anyway right? Unless you like to play your games at 1024x768 at 30fps that is I've been around pc gaming long enough to know that it's very hard to trust these. So I always assume things will need to be taken up a notch, or two..

So what I did find was these requirements off a site called bf4central:

Quad core CPU (Intel Core i5 or i7) at 3 Ghz
4 GB memory (8 GB for 64-bit operating systems)
A modern DX11 graphics card with 1 GB of video memory, GeForce 600 series or Radeon 7000 series
Windows 7 64-bit operating system (Windows 8 is supported as well)
20+ GB of free harddrive space

And these from various sites including a site called bf4talk. These are apparently taken from the ubisoft store. Though I followed the link there and there was no such thing listed. Maybe they just took them down:

OS: Windows 7 64-bit
Processor: Quad-core CPU
Memory: 4 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB
Video Card: DirectX 11 compatible with 1024 MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 or ATI Radeon 6950)
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible

Origin has nothing as you can see: https://www.origin.com/en-gb/store/b...dition#details


Now I'm pretty sure that when I watched one of the first BF4 gameplay videos, the devs said it was playing on a 7970 and that AMD were their hardware partners. That's all I heard I think..

BF3 and Skyrim were the games that gave me upgradeitis back in 2011/12. I've been very happy with my setup since then. But I'm starting to think I'm going to get a bad case of it again later this year :/

I'm wondering if my 2500K @4.5ghz and single 7970 are going to cut it for this game! I can see all these new destruction features in the game demanding a pc juiced up with some serious hardware steroids! Especially when it comes to full scale MP battles.

What do you guys think are realistic requirements for this game? I'd probably like to play it on at least high settings at 60fps.. Also, what are your general thoughts on the game, think it looks much improved from BF3?

Edit: If anyone has played the BF4 Alpha - Please give us your feedback!!

[kalniel]

If it's a real beta then they'll actually use it to help inform what the likely system requirements are.

[Firejack]

System requirements will be the same as BF3 with only one change - the requirement for a 64-bit OS. This has been the talk since BF4 was announced and there hasn't been anything further said since.


BF4 is BF3.5. Its not going to offer anything significantly different from what I've read/watched. Most of the development work on the engine looks to be aimed a the upcoming PS4/XBone launch. AMD PC users will likely see some small benefits because of the AMD APU's powering the new consoles.


For me to get BF4 something needs to be done about the vehicle combat. Right now even with bugs, balance issues and FPS drops. Planetside 2 is more fun.

BF3 vehicle mechanics are great on paper. In practice unlimited ammo, limited vehicle spawns and totally unbalanced aircraft ruins the more enjoyable open maps. Armored Shield for example is a fantastic map for tank battles. Unfortunately the Gunship and Helicopters hovering at flight ceiling just suck any enjoyment out of the round for those on the ground.

I'm sure DICE are aware of this. Its not hard to see the problem. You have 1 Armored Shield server for every 50 Metro servers. Because nobody enjoys the vehicle balance in BF3. You either get a kill streak in a vehicle or you are the guy who is mercilessly killed over and over.

[ZaO]

If it's a real beta then they'll actually use it to help inform what the likely system requirements are.

Yeh we'll all have a much better idea by then I'm sure. There's nothing like actually playing a game to determine what specs you need! But I would just like to speculate what sort of system we'll need until that point

System requirements will be the same as BF3 with only one change - the requirement for a 64-bit OS. This has been the talk since BF4 was announced and there hasn't been anything further said since.


BF4 is BF3.5. Its not going to offer anything significantly different from what I've read/watched. Most of the development work on the engine looks to be aimed a the upcoming PS4/XBone launch. AMD PC users will likely see some small benefits because of the AMD APU's powering the new consoles.


For me to get BF4 something needs to be done about the vehicle combat. Right now even with bugs, balance issues and FPS drops. Planetside 2 is more fun.

BF3 vehicle mechanics are great on paper. In practice unlimited ammo, limited vehicle spawns and totally unbalanced aircraft ruins the more enjoyable open maps. Armored Shield for example is a fantastic map for tank battles. Unfortunately the Gunship and Helicopters hovering at flight ceiling just suck any enjoyment out of the round for those on the ground.

I'm sure DICE are aware of this. Its not hard to see the problem. You have 1 Armored Shield server for every 50 Metro servers. Because nobody enjoys the vehicle balance in BF3. You either get a kill streak in a vehicle or you are the guy who is mercilessly killed over and over.

You really don't think this game is gonna stress things more than bf3? The new destruction doesn't seem as impressive to me as to some people. But I still think it's going to need a bit more juice. Especially when the levels are supposed to be even bigger, meaning more destruction going on, even if it was only as complicated and dynamic as bf3's destruction.. But maybe they've done some better optimisation on the game engine. Hmm, we'll see..

I agree that the vehicle combat feels a bit off in bf3. I do like it and play vehicles a lot. But they just seem way to vunerable. Especially choppers! Attack choppers are nothing to fear in bf3. So easily taken down, especially when there's 2 jets attacking them! They should never have nerfed them and taken out the ability for the gunner to have flares.. They just maneuver way too slowly as well! I do like Planetside 2 myself. Runs like crap a lot of the time though..

There has been a BF4 closed Alpha already btw. I only found out about this today! They kept that one quiet.. Did anyone play it??

[Butuz]

I'm wondering if my 2500K @4.5ghz and single 7970 are going to cut it for this game! I can see all these new destruction features in the game demanding a pc juiced up with some serious hardware steroids! Especially when it comes to full scale MP battles.

It should be fine on that @ 1080p and if not, drop another 7970 and your good to go.

Butuz

[Firejack]

......
You really don't think this game is gonna stress things more than bf3? The new destruction doesn't seem as impressive to me as to some people. But I still think it's going to need a bit more juice. Especially when the levels are supposed to be even bigger, meaning more destruction going on, even if it was only as complicated and dynamic as bf3's destruction.. But maybe they've done some better optimisation on the game engine. Hmm, we'll see....

Aye we will.
With so much of the talk from DICE having been about bringing the console experience up to the same level as PC. The way I interpret that is I just can't see them pushing the boundaries further on PC. The Levolution stuff all seems scripted and to be the same event each time on a particular map. That doesn't seem like it'll be too demanding on hardware.

DICE has also spent significant time and resources keeping us BF3 players happy with updates to BF3, new DLCs, Battlelog updates etc. If you combined that with the amount of effort its taken to prepare for the PS4/XBone launches. I can't see there having been a lot of time left for DICE to advance BF4 on PC by anything but marginal improvements. DICE are an exceptional game studio so they may spring a surprise or two. For me though I just doubt there has been the time.

[ZaO]

It should be fine on that @ 1080p and if not, drop another 7970 and your good to go.

Butuz

Yeh I'm sure 2 7970's will do a good job. But I'm not sure how well the 2500K will do with 2 7970's! It might bottleneck a little..

Aye we will.
With so much of the talk from DICE having been about bringing the console experience up to the same level as PC. The way I interpret that is I just can't see them pushing the boundaries further on PC. The Levolution stuff all seems scripted and to be the same event each time on a particular map. That doesn't seem like it'll be too demanding on hardware.

DICE has also spent significant time and resources keeping us BF3 players happy with updates to BF3, new DLCs, Battlelog updates etc. If you combined that with the amount of effort its taken to prepare for the PS4/XBone launches. I can't see there having been a lot of time left for DICE to advance BF4 on PC by anything but marginal improvements. DICE are an exceptional game studio so they may spring a surprise or two. For me though I just doubt there has been the time.

Games are always at least visually better on pc, even when they're bad console ports. We have better options for things like AA and can run better frame rates if our hardware is good enough. But yeh, it might not be much of a leap from BF3 for us. I also thought a lot of those events look like the same scripted thing each time so they shouldn't be as stressful as dynamic destruction. But I remember how everyone was talking about BF3 when the Beta was coming up. Thinking their setup would be just fine. Look how that turned out.. I think a lot of people did major upgrades to get a better experience. It really is tough to hold down a pretty solid 60fps with decent settings in high end games. My guess is that two 7970's (or close to that gpu power) and an i7 (or amd equivalent) of some sort will be needed to run this with Ultra settings and 2xmsaa in 64 player MP battles with 60fps. I hope I'm wrong though! But Arma 3 has got me wanting to upgrade my cpu.. Can't wait for the BF4 Beta either way

[kalniel]

Yeh I'm sure 2 7970's will do a good job. But I'm not sure how well the 2500K will do with 2 7970's! It might bottleneck a little..

If it wasn't bottlenecking then you'd only have to go and add even more GPUs... something will always bottleneck or your computer would be infinity fast

But on a graphics heavy game I don't think the 2500k will be the bottleneck any time soon, or if it is, it might limit you to *only* 150fps or something silly.

[ZaO]

If it wasn't bottlenecking then you'd only have to go and add even more GPUs... something will always bottleneck or your computer would be infinity fast

But on a graphics heavy game I don't think the 2500k will be the bottleneck any time soon, or if it is, it might limit you to *only* 150fps or something silly.

Yeh I see your point But I think games have started becoming a lot more cpu dependant because of consoles. I don't think that idea of throwing most of your cash into a good gpu with just an alright cpu is really a good one anymore. Physics seem to tax cpu's quite a lot I thought...?

[kalniel]

Yeh I see your point But I think games have started becoming a lot more cpu dependant because of consoles. I don't think that idea of throwing most of your cash into a good gpu with just an alright cpu is really a good one anymore. Physics seem to tax cpu's quite a lot I thought...?

Well next gen consoles are effectively an AMD laptop CPU with a mid-range desktop GPU.. they're not going to push even today's PC desktops for CPU power so there's no reason devs would want to push CPU over GPU. Even in the PC market CPU are coming with ever more powerful GPUs built in so I don't think games are going to become more CPU dependant.

[ZaO]

Well next gen consoles are effectively an AMD laptop CPU with a mid-range desktop GPU.. they're not going to push even today's PC desktops for CPU power so there's no reason devs would want to push CPU over GPU. Even in the PC market CPU are coming with ever more powerful GPUs built in so I don't think games are going to become more CPU dependant.

I think games have already started becoming more cpu dependant than ever before.. Also the new consoles have 8 core cpu's when they only have gpu power which you would typically only run alongside a quad core on a pc. I think the current consoles are also more powerful in their cpu's compared tp gpu's..

[kalniel]

I think games have already started becoming more cpu dependant than ever before.. Also the new consoles have 8 core cpu's when they only have gpu power which you would typically only run alongside a quad core on a pc. I think the current consoles are also more powerful in their cpu's compared tp gpu's..

Oh don't tell me you've fallen for AMDs core nomenclature Go read the piledriver chat thread It's exactly like I said - they are running 4 module/8core AMD APUs which combine a low power CPU with a roughly pitcairn 7850 level of GPU performance. That's a match in favour of GPU power, as you'd expect from a gaming dedicated bit of hardware, and in CPU power is below what you'd expect of a gaming desktop PC these days.

[Firejack]

I don't think its as easy as dividing up the APU into the 2 parts of 1 part CPU and 1 part GPU, when talking about performance. This new APU upcoming in the new consoles is the first "true APU" and is what AMD has been working towards ever since buying ATI.

This APU for gaming could be the biggest leap in performance since the introduction of the GPU.

The merging of system memory and video memory into one unified pool for the entire system is an exciting prospect. No longer will graphics performance be held back by need to wait for the graphics data to be fed to it. It will be available instantly.


Back on topic though. BF3 is so well optimized you could run it perfectly fine on low end hardware. I used to run BF3 1080p @ 30 FPS+ (only dipping as low as 25 FPS in rare occasions) on a 512MB HD4850. I've no reason to think DICE won't perform this level of wizardry in BF4. After all they know to drive sales they need to perform well on as wide range of High, medium and low end hardware as possible.

[kalniel]

I don't think its as easy as dividing up the APU into the 2 parts of 1 part CPU and 1 part GPU, when talking about performance. This new APU upcoming in the new consoles is the first "true APU" and is what AMD has been working towards ever since buying ATI.

Well not really. It's just a Jaguar APU. The GPU is still fairly separate, they were working towards a state where you'd have the FPU shared between GPU and CPU type functionality, but it's not in this chip yet, so you have the usual double int performance (or halved FP performance).
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...ames-consoles/

This APU for gaming could be the biggest leap in performance since the introduction of the GPU.

It's not, sorry.

The merging of system memory and video memory into one unified pool for the entire system is an exciting prospect. No longer will graphics performance be held back by need to wait for the graphics data to be fed to it. It will be available instantly.

You mean like it's been shared for integrated GPUs for a while on PCs? Granted, the RAM in the case of the PS4 is a lot quicker, and benefits from more direct access, but don't kid yourself that high bandwidth shared RAM is going to make up for the lack of processing power.

No, the benefits of consoles comes from their single-specification and dedicated OSen, enabling a lot of optimisation. Hardware wise the next gen are basically PC laptops with good graphics.

[Firejack]

.... It's not, sorry.

Nobody can say that with any certainty. What we are discussing is purely theory and thats why I suggested it *could* be the biggest performance improvement. Until we get our hands on the hardware with a compatible OS and software then nobody knows.

What is exciting is currently we have:
Processor (CPU) + DDR3 + Graphics (GPU) + GDDR5

What these APU's will give us is:
Processor + Graphics + GDDR5

Taking system memory out of the loop has to improve efficiency and therefore performance you would assume.

.... You mean like it's been shared for integrated GPUs for a while on PCs? Granted, the RAM in the case of the PS4 is a lot quicker, and benefits from more direct access, but don't kid yourself that high bandwidth shared RAM is going to make up for the lack of processing power.

I'm not. All I'm saying is on paper 1.6GHz in an APU may take you a lot further then it did on a CPU.

Anyhow, sorry for derailing your thread Za0

[kalniel]

Nobody can say that with any certainty. What we are discussing is purely theory

Well no, it's not that theoretical - we know a lot about the architecture and likely performance already.

What is exciting is currently we have:
Processor (CPU) + DDR3 + Graphics (GPU) + GDDR5

What these APU's will give us is:
Processor + Graphics + GDDR5

You're misunderstanding. What we have currently is [CPU + GPU] + DDR3. What we are getting is [CPU + GPU] + GDDR5 (in the best case - PS4). That's not going to give a huge step in CPU performance at all.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6976/a...-kabini-temash

Taking system memory out of the loop has to improve efficiency and therefore performance you would assume.

System memory isn't being taken out of the loop at all - see the above architecture design, it's slightly better integrated between CPU and GPU and on the whole just faster (in PS4s case). But you can't just stick faster memory on a laptop chip and suddenly expect it to perform miracles.

Like for like - ie comparing an all-in console chip to an all-in laptop chip, yes I quite agree it will be faster. But you have to have realistic expectations based on what we already know, ie, the CPU grunt will be significantly below a desktop CPU. Does that matter? Like I said, not in the slightest - everyone will design for the power available anyway, and push more load away from the CPU and onto the GPU.