Battlefield 2 Hardware Upgrade Guide

With Battlefield 2, you're going to need all the frames you can get. It doesn't get more taxing than a 64-person online first-person shooter. If you want to make snap 180-degree turns without seeing your screen turn into a frame-by-frame slideshow, you'll need to adjust the graphical settings, as well as possibly upgrade your computer.

We tested Battlefield 2 using the built-in video recording functionality in combination with FRAPS. However, these tests come with a caveat. Since you'll likely play Battlefield 2 online, the action will get very intense. The videos we used to test out the game only tell part of the story. To maintain reproducibility, we couldn't move the in-game camera around while testing. So the best we could do was lock it to a single player. Sometimes the camera gets stuck in a hillside, and other times it's just rendering a wall behind the player. Obviously, you're not going to be playing like that. We also found that the videos don't take into account the high level of combat present in most online games. As such, we also performed a great deal of in-game testing on each hardware setup and have included comments, wherever possible, to complement the performance scores we gathered.

Guide Sections

Battlefield 2 is capable of putting up decent frame rates on most systems, but you'll have to adjust many settings to get the best performance from your particular PC setup. We've divided our guide into four sections: Video Card, Game Settings, CPU, and Memory. Each section features a number of test results and subjective, in-game performance observations.

Game Settings
Reducing graphical quality helps to smooth out frame rates. In our game-settings tests, we experimented with the different in-game graphical settings to see which video options impacted performance the most. We paired a Radeon X850 XT with a Pentium 4 3.8GHz for our game-settings tests.

Graphics
Battlefield 2 has a remarkably low tolerance for older video cards. Support for legacy video cards, if we can call them that, only goes back to the previous generation of video cards. Cards like the Radeon 9700 and the GeForce FX barely make the cut. We compare 10 video cards, ranging from the Radeon X850 XT right down to the GeForce FX. We paired our cards up with an Athlon 4000+ and a Pentium 4 3.8GHz.

CPU
We tested CPU scaling by matching up a range of AMD and Intel CPUs with the GeForce 6800 Ultra and the Radeon X850 XT. We tested with the Pentium 4 2.8GHz up to 3.8GHz, as well as with the Athlon 3000+ up to the 4000+.

Memory
We varied memory amounts on a system to see whether changing the system RAM had an effect on performance. We tested with two different setups and used between 512MB and 2GB of RAM to check out the effects.