Battlefield 2142 Performance Guide

By: Sarju Shah - Posted on Wednesday, Oct 24th, 2006

Systems that run Battlefield 2 without a hitch will likely need few modifications to keep up with Battlefield 2142. But if you're on an older rig, you might need to upgrade a few parts. The two games are largely the same, but DICE gave 2142 a slightly updated graphical engine that has new animations and updated shaders.

We tested Battlefield 2142 using FRAPs and a 25-second driving scenario in the 48-person Suez Canal map. The frame rate results were consistent, but the numbers might be on the high side since the test doesn't include a lot of player models. We didn't play on populated servers or against other bots to keep our tests reproducible. The game also has a built-in frame rate cap of 100 frames per second. We increased graphics settings for our more powerful hardware to keep frame rates below the cap.

Game Settings
Battlefield 2142 has a few settings you can tweak to improve performance. We tested all the options to find out how much each setting affected frame-rate performance.

Graphics
Battlefield 2142 is based on the now-aging Battlefield 2 engine, which means it should run fine on moderate hardware. But if you're thinking of upgrading, we tested nearly 20 video cards to help you determine how much performance is enough.

CPU
We tested the game up and down the clock-speed ladder on our Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 CPU-based systems. We even brought in some single core CPUs to see how they performed.

Memory
Moving up from 512MB to 1GB of system memory will help improve performance in most PC games. But it seems that even 2GB of RAM will give noticeable performance gains with Battlefield 2142.