It is nice to see all the new faces at BK, welcome. I took a little break from CoD and played some other games for a bit. After playing the beta, I am very excited to play BF3 as are many of you. I am going to attempt to answer the question of why Frames Per Second are important in an online First Person Shooter.

First, take a look at the difference between 60 FPS, 30 FPS and 15 FPS :

60/30 FPS You Tube
BoAllen.com

There are two types of lag in a computer game, internet (packet loss) and video (low FPS).

I don't know the math and could not find a good explanation on the web. Sixty (60) FPS has been, since vanilla CoD, the lowest frame rate that you want to run at in order to be able to play at a competitive level, you may still enjoy the game at <60 but you are going to be frustrated and this is why.

You all have experienced internet lag, your character is running, you have an internet lag spike and your character is now 15 feet ahead of where it is was before the spike but you didn't see it move. Video lag is the same thing, but you can correct this problem with the correct hardware. As you can see in the two above links, your eyes can see a difference between 15/30/60 FPS. The number of frames that are missing between 15 and 60 are frames in a game that you are not seeing, during those missing frames an opposing player can seem to get the jump on you. This may also be apparent when you get three hit indicators on an enemy and he turns around and one shots you. You were not seeing the frames and he was.

I was frustrated with the beta, I installed two new 460's and was getting 10-15 FPS. I don't know what made it work but this is what I did. I set everything to default and changed the game to full screen, instantly I jumped to 70 FPS.

Anyone that is interested in playing the game at high frames with good graphics should consider the following upgrades:
Quad core CPU
a single Direct X 11 video card or crossfire/sli
Windows 7 64 with 8 gigs of memory

The 460 1 gig EVGA cards are a good bang for your buck.

Here are some other standards for competitive gaming:
Wired mouse
Wired keyboard
LCD monitor with <5ms refresh
Updated video drivers
laptops are generally not good for gaming

Have fun!

Edit 1: We also found that Origin/BF3 only worked with Firefox for some folks

can't afford any new additions to my PC and didn't have a chance to get beta, will this system play BF3 at an acceptable level do you think even if it requires toning down some settings.


NVIDIA GeForce 265GTX
AMD Phenom 9950 Quad core
Windows XP (updating to 7) 4gb ram

You should be able to handle it, but not on ultra.

Im running avg 45-50 fps. Min 30fps.
AMD QUAD Core 945 Phenom II 3.0GHZ
MSI NGTX470 Twin Frozr II 1GBVRAM slight OC(max temp 59c)
8gb ddr3 1066
MSI 890FXA-GD65 mono
corsair force series 3 120GB SSD

This is with ULTRA settings and res of 1920x1200
27" widescreen HD 3ms response/120hz

I will be upgrading my gpu to a MSI N580GTX Lightning Edition. I think I will be good with that for a few years!

Lewzz, you will not be able to play it on XP unless EA decides to add XP support between now and release.

Also, the 265 may give you problems. Two of my friends were running the 295gtx for the beta. With Metro, they were getting around 30-40 fps outside but inside the subway tunnel the fps dropped as low as 7 and never went above 15. This was frustrating enough for them to quit playing and start working on getting their video upgrades. I do not know if either ever tried the lowest settings for this map.

They played again when they opened Caspian Border back up. Both of them had to play with the lowest setting and were happy with the game play but both still had very low fps.

I am using an ATI 5850 and kept the game set on medium and never saw my frames drop below 50 unless multiple vehicles were blowing up right in front of me. Usually, I was sitting between 55-65.

Edit: As of the 6th or 7th (which is when I got tired of reading through all of the crap on the forums to find useful posts) the Ultra setting were not actually enabled in the bets. Supposedly there was no difference between Ultra and Highest. Also, Zh1nto posted that to be able to run the game on Ultra would require 2x Nvidia 580GTX.

If I recall, I was running on High and 4xmsaa with a low of 70FPS and a max of 149FPS, the game looked great at these settings. Listen to Trygar's post, XP is not and will not be supported, so if you are going to upgrade anything focus on the OS and video cards first.

The most likely reason they were getting such bad FPS is that the 200 series Nvidia cards don't support DX11.

I know this is painful for alot of you, having to upgrade just for this game, but this is the first time in a long while we have been forced to make such drastic hardware/OS changes, and really its about time. XP had a nice run of 10 years.

So I will chime in and agree completely that you want 60fps or better if at all possible and should consider sacrificing graphics quality to get the better frame rate.. It's that important..

If you're having frame rate issues, always go to fullscreen.  Fullscreen gaming will always be faster because DirectX (or even opengl) will have a more direct access to the video hardware and doesn't have to play nice with windows overlays and video buffering that windows needs to run in the background.  In windowed mode there is not only the 3D rendering in the game window going on, but also the 2d rendering of all the windows stuff that you don't need or even want..

If you're going to buy a new graphics card, hold out until you get $220 or so and get the Geforce gtx 560..  ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500210 )  It's a good card for the price point and does a really good job at most things.

If you have skads of money ($720) get the Radeon HD 6990 as it's the top dog right now. ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127574 )
Avoid the Nvidia gtx 590 as it's just a dual 580 on a single card and as such has horrible heat issues, the 580 is a damn good card though but pricey too.. Only get the 580 over the 6990 if you plan to do cuda grid computing in the background.

As to monitors;
There is a vast difference between "refresh rate" and "response rate" and both terms suffer greatly from marketing abuse.   They both have been smeared and retermed to the point of being almost meaningless.

Refresh rate in a standard tube tv described the speed at which the raster (the electron beam) moved from top left to bottom right in one second.. It means less in lcd since there is no raster.. By todays definition its the time allotted for each frame of video to be displayed on the screen then divided into one second.   It's basically the display frame rate..

Most people on an old crt monitor would be mildly uncomfortable below 72hz and in pain at about 58hz.. Much farther below that and it would be seizure inducing or destructive to the crt.. LCDs though are different and most people do fine at 60hz or higher and can't tell the difference between 75hz and 85hz..  

Most modern lcd monitors have a refresh rate between 60hz and 120hz.  Generally the faster, the better.  However, a lot of monitors that say they are 120hz are actually 60hz interpolated which isn't as good (in my opinion) as a 75hz monitor. etc..  More over the hz number on an lcd monitor really doesn't mean very much and only comes into sharp focus with vertical tearing and lcd blur which is a much larger discussion that hasn't even been solved by the industry as a whole yet.

In short, the primary reason you want a higher refresh rate is due to lcd motion blur.  However it has been proven time and again that simply increasing the refresh rate wont fix the motion blur problem so the industry is kind of all over the place..  this is why 120hz can mean multiple things and why a lot of the marketing jargon is gobbledygook..

Response rate (or response time) is usually listed from 25ms to as low as 1ms(?!) and is arguably the more important number and the hardest one to guarantee because of all the shenanigans that modern companies employ..  As a general rule your response rate describes the speed at which a single pixel can change color from black to white and back to black again, so the lower the number the better.. for years the absolutely fastest this was possible was around 8ms (usually somewhere between 8 and 16)

So what companies did is change the test from black/white/black to grey/white/grey which drastically shortened the time it takes and low and behold suddenly they have magically made faster monitors!  No nothings changed.. its still that 8ms response rate, but they can list it as 4ms because of the change in the test..   Its a gimmick that a lot of manufacturers employ to make a really cheap lcd panel seem fast..   I have also seen them list 3ms and 2ms panels that simply tested the black to white rate alone (not going back to black again) or the grey to white rate.   The 1ms panel I saw was running a test from white to white.. to white..   they actually measured the time it took to not change the color at all and got 1ms.. It's a miracle!!  Again.. gimmick.  

Buyer beware here and use your best judgement.. If you're buying a $100 lcd and it has miracle stats.. its probably lying to you.. =)  Anything below 16ms will be likely be just fine and even that 8ms panel will spike up to as high as 30ms depending on whats going on..  

Also on a side note I would say pay attention to contrast ratio and brightness as well..  Most modern monitors are nice and bright but you want a high contrast ratio if you can get one.. it just makes whites white and blacks blacker..  its really noticeable too once you get a good one next to a bad one..  I have one lcd that looks like mud when next to my other monitors just due to a poor contrast ratio..

I would argue that you don't really need a wired mouse or a wired keyboard though.  Bluetooth / Wifi or any of the other proprietary wireless systems out there still send the data between the device and machine at the speed of light which is the same speed as a cable.. Any 1 or 2 ms noise that might be introduced as a result of it being wireless is completely and wholly negligible..

As to my experience with the game so far;  I have a pretty beastly machine and I was able to get a over 100 fps at 1920x1200 in most places with everything turned to max (except AA which I think had only at 2) which implied to me that they have done a very good job at optimization..  And that's in window mode, with a second monitor plugged into the same card rendering a movie.. heh (I tend to do silly tests)

My machine is an Intel 8 Core i7-2600 overclocked to 4.4ghz with 16gigz of ram and an nvidia gtx 580 with 4gigs of memory so I'm not sure if its fair of me to say they did a good job.. but I think they did..

okay so i was doing some snooping around and graphics cards are cheaper than i thought... Not cheap for myself by any means but maybe affordable.

so for BF3 release I'm thinking of upgrading from 4gb ram to 6 or 8, along with updating to windows 7 and as for my graphics card looking strongly at the NVIDIA GTX 560Ti, would that setup offer good enough performance do you guys think?

proposed system..?
AMD Phenom 9950 quad core
Windows 7
6/8gb ram
NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti

just noticed above post recommending the 560, think that system will cope and put ~60Fps+?

It should be fine. You will probably be able to run the game with high settings.

Hey Lewzz,

The 560 and 560ti are both amazing cards for the price point.  I generally think the least expensive / best option is the 560, which was my point.    When you boil it down to the nuts and bolts the 560ti is basically a 460 rebranded while the 560 is a 460se rebranded but with a new dye.  Stock, the 560ti is the better card when it comes to base numbers, for example the 560 has less shader cores than the 560ti and the ti has higher clock speeds.   So base if you consider http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-560-amp-edition-gtx-560-directcu-ii-top,2944-6.html you'll see the TI wins. The 560 used in those tests was stock.

However, what you must take into account is that the 560 is a completely redesigned gpu and will beat the ti when you factor in overclocking.. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-560-amp-edition-gtx-560-directcu-ii-top,2944-15.html
 
Quite a few manufacturers have already started to ship overclocked boards;  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500210 this card is heavily overclocked and has a core clock of 950mhz and a shader clock at 1900mhz (compared to 822mhz and 1645mhz of the ti) plus has really good feedback across the board..  At those clock speeds it actually pushes past the ti in most performance tests..  Plus, its cheaper than the ti..  

This is not to detract from the ti at all.. it's a good card, but for the money I'd go with that card I linked..

More memory is always good just be sure to go to 64 bit windows or it's a waste of your money.. Make sure your CPU can support 64..

Heres what i have.  The beta ran pretty good for me.  1920x1080.  Not sure what my graphics were set at but i assume default with maybe a downgrade to my AA settings.

Phenom II x4 955 BlackEdition 3.2 (oc;d to 3.6 i think..i havent checked in forever)
4g DDR2 800 G.Skill Ram
ASUS Gtx 460 768mb Superclocked GF card.
Win 7 x64

I heard somewhere that Dice downplayed the graphics on the beta, and that Ultra, wasnt really what Ultra will be in the final release.  Is this true?  Was i being trolled?  I dont think so, but even if i have to play the game on medium or low(thta will be a first i have yet to throw a game at this rig that it really just CAN NOT handle.)

I actually heard something similar.. some folks were saying it was a scaled back version of the frostbite 2 engine and that not everything was in yet..  *shrug*  seemed like a good story to me.. I still think it looked fantastic and anything else they add at this point is just gravy..

i couldnt agree more.

Basically i heard that ULTRA on the Beta was really like Medium...some said Low.  If that was either or, anything added is absolutely gravy.  And i will lose no sleep if my game runs fine on those settings and still looks that good.

Hey Toiletduck, use the link below for your sig, we really dont wanna see that message when you post.

Code:

[img]http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb91/Garddawg77/Bad%20Karma/toiletducksig.png[/img]

Yeah sorry guys I had a bad entry in my .htaccess file which was showing you very much the wrong image..  

Please forgive me.. it should be correct now..

(Oddly it will always look correct to me because I'm on the right side of the firewall..,hehe please let me know asap if its still wrong.. )