Battlefield 3 on M18x - Discussion Thread

Has anyone got the Alienware Dog-Tag to work?

I got the code from Alienware Arena forums and redeemed it in Origin with no problems but it doesn't appear in my Dog-Tags, I only have a Battlefield one and 2 Deus Ex ones.

 

I got it working. Need to scroll way down in the dog tag list and select the one with the teeth. Do it on the webpage on your profile.

 

Got it working now, took a while though, wasn't there yesterday but it's there now.

 

ok, so what are you guys getting on average...just running through the first part of the game?

 

Hey John,

I just reran the beginning with fraps (ULTRA preset no alterations); took a crappy vid cam from my phone but will just report. Obviously my cards are weaker and drivers are irrelevant to you. Here are my findings, hopefully others will use the same "bench." Mine was at stock (NO GPU OC):
1 intro to the bus was 50s almost consistently. On top of the train it dropped at one point to 46fps. Back inside the train with multiple enemies before the scene ended it dropped to 40s. Scene ends.

Next scene in the RV with all the squad mates talking: 40s. I then turned off AA and kept everything ultra. The RV scene shot up to 75FPS consistent.

When we exit the RV into the town the FPS ranges from 55-75FPS. Completely fluent. I think that scene is one of the most beautiful and a good indicator of performance. And also, from my perspective AA is COMPLETELY irrelevant in this game from a performance cost. I looked at the telephone wires (always a good test for AA) on the outside scene after exiting the RV...no jaggies. I can't tell any difference but a 20-30FPS bump.

I hope this helps.

 

Guys, no need for Fraps with BF3

Hit the ~ key. Then type render.DrawFPS TRUE

BAM FPS displayed in the top right.

 

for the first part...i was getting like 20 to 30 fps...some how sli wasn't working...got that working and things start running a bit better. i look at the ground and noticed no tessellation going on. averaging about 70 to 100 fps with dips to about 60+(aa deferred off)

cool. i was looking for this.

 

Very nice +rep

 

Thanks guys.

John I think i read somewhere that Bf3 didn't have tesselation. It was when i was thinking FPS could be boasted by overriding tesselation through ccc. I figured being a dx11 title there would be tesselation in the game. Otherwise what's the point if being dx11

 

yeah, textures look worse than the heaven benchmark with no tessellation.

to be quite frank...game looks like a dx10 model.

 

Agreed which I dont understand what's so dx11 about it.

 

Yes exactly. Earlier I was mentioning how the game is really bland hidden behind very good lighting. I would like to see proof of no tessellation though; but I guess the way the game is running, there probably isn't. It seems like the AMD cards are running right with the 580s; probably due to the less stringent GPU requirements. My 6970s are running with about the same FPS 50-75ish; 50 being around the worst. Either way, the game is "meh."

I was never really into the BF series and wanted to give this a shot. My old clanmates would play BF and I could see how the extra classes, vehicles ect would be very important. This, again, is victim of console BS.

MW3 will be the same thing; it will fly. I think my old theory will be correct:
Any games really are going to play fine on this system, or the next (7 series) and it won't matter upgrading or not. Once the new consoles arrive in about 2 years, the 6970s/6990/79xx/whatever will all play the Next Gen games the same.....crappy to unplayable.

If the PS Vita is sporting an SGX543MP which puts out some serious HP for a mobile device, then the consoles should have whatever the BEST desktop GPU is on the market at the time of release (2013-2014) which will absolutely dinosaur these systems. However, for us enthusiasts it won't matter as the upgrades always continue. But for the ones who really wanted to get a good 4 years gaming....will be tough.

In retrospect, my old R2 with CF5870 RGB 920xm TS was the pinnacle system to own and if left stock with no upgrades, would have been the best investment to ride out until the next consoles hit. CF5870 will play any game at very close to the visual fidelity that we play now; just minus a few shader ticks and AA ticks in the CP. But I do love the m18x....for now

 

and i also have to agree that this..."mice in a maze" is pretty boring...i see some other ways to go, but you get the out of area flag fling....lol

 

Yeah it showed up for me. Edit your origin account settings to access it.

 

looks like nvidia and ati are the exact same in performance until MSAA is turned on which then gives nvidia a good lead. hopefully ati will fix this .

Battlefield 3 GPU & CPU Performance > High Quality - 1920x1200 - TechSpot Reviews

overall i'd say nvidia wins in this game hands down. o well.

 

Swap to the greens, M8. Looks like it's the only way to make you a happy camper, hehe.

 

Interesting................
Battlefield 3 GPU & CPU Performance > Conclusion - TechSpot Reviews

Quote
When we started testing on our own it became apparent why AMD did this. With MSAA enabled the performance sharply declines with Radeon boards and previous generation Nvidia products make AMD’s current generation hardware look foolish. However disabling MSAA allows AMD to catch up to Nvidia, as you saw in our High quality 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 tests.

Without MSAA the Radeon HD 6970 looks far more impressive, as it was able to match the GeForce GTX 580 while setting you back 27% less. The same can be said about multi-GPU setups which saw the Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire cards mimic the performance of the GeForce GTX 580 SLI configuration.


In short, AMD users should avoid using the MSAA setting unless they have a top notch Crossfire setup. On the other hand, owners of GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570 graphics cards can afford to enable MSAA at resolutions up to 1920x1200. It's a small visual compromise, as I personally find the MSAA setting to add a certain degree of polish but not nearly enough to justify the big performance drop in AMD boards. You'll be happy to live without it.


At this point I'd just wait for the R2 with 585M SLI+. Unless you can find a good price on Clevo cards.

Aiki, how much do Clevo 580M cards cost and do they work on the M18x?

 

Thanks for the tip +rep

 

anybody got 5.1 sound working with m18x? i have logitech z906 connected via s/pdif and 5.1 works with windows media player no problem. I just can get it to work in any games

 

finished the game it self...not impressed at all.
did end up averaging about 80+ frames wit some dips to about 65 from time to time. maxed at about 185 for video cut scenes and about 130+ max during some parts of the game. there is no tessellation what so ever in game and the ground and paper on the ground look pretty dx10'sy if you ask me.

 

My take on the GPU front has changed. I am no fanboy of either side. The 6970 when introduced was, to me, what the 5870 SHOULD have been. It was a very good and is a very good card. The 6990 is a slight evolution. I cancelled my orders on them as it isn't worth the upgrade. I am going to wait out until the 7 series and probably just sell this system and my R2 and upgrade to the 18x R2.

The irony is that even though I will upgrade this system no doubt or replace it....I am mainly playing CS:S and l4d2 lmao....what a nubstick I am

 

John, quit messing with that single player shenanigans and play some multiplayer. Join the NBR platoon. Get yo freak on!

 

i will. but more than likely on the xbox though.

 

Though a victim of being a console DX10 crapper; this is STILL a PC game and plays like a PC game. The maps fortunately have a lot of quick twitch corners that only a mouse can accurately get to in time. I would highly recommending sticking to PC MP on this one. COD can go either way. But BF/CS:S..PC all the way.

 

I don't have the retail game, don't plan on buying it that soon. What I found was the engine renders smoke and other shader effects very very well almost life like. Textures are not comparable to metro 2033. Crysis 2 on the other hand has some good hi-res textures (after the release of DX11 pack) and then a good chunk them some of them look like the game is from the early 2007s. Some portions are not tessellated at all like you would expect them to be. Crysis 2 is no match for Metro 2033, its pure crytek garbage with make-shift hi-res here and there plus gimmicky unwanted tessellation factors.

BF3 concentrates on shaders and thats where it excels. I don't know about the textures on the retail version, but texture mapping will cost laptops and desktop cards almost nothing to render if they provide them as add-ons in the future. Its not the same for consoles that are memory limited and bandwidth limited to read such large textures. Which is why most games have poor textures in general.

BF3 is engine that looks good for the most part without outrageous hits on performance across the board. It may well be the future engine of choice like how the unreal 3 engine has racked up design wins with countless console and PC games. Many games built on the unreal 3 engine may look dated on their textures but the feature wise they can be made to look very very good indeed. Like the Uncharted series on consoles.

There are other subtle differences that make BF3' frost bite 2 stand out, and they have been demoed at SIGGRAPH. They have presented papers on the engine and it has tessellation in it, don't know if they don't have it going in BF3 just yet listening to what most of you have apparently noticed. Maybe its not enabled which is a shame in that case. The engine is certainly capable of it.

But then again look at what they are trying to do, Playability across the board, so disabling a taxing feature like tessellation maybe deliberate.

Good thing you did, except for Crysis 2 these 6970Ms duals are more than enough.

7000 series should improve on general tessellation performance with dual tessellator engines compared to bart's single tessellator.

 

it's only because i have people i play with on xbox or playstation. so i tend to want to move up the ranks there. and i may give the mp a shot on the pc when i get time...but so far...project reality seems to be just as good as this.....but then...that's speculation on my part.

 

Smoke in BF3 looks great, no doubt about it,, as well as lighting.

Where it excels in my mind is the sound. I have the sound through my Nuforce uDAC2 and into my Bose QC2, and it sounds amazing. Very life like. For instance. When you getting sniped at you hear the round "snap" past you. In reality, rounds don't whiz by you. They make a distinct snap. I like the sound in this game.

 

Yeah, the reason why Bioware wanted DICE's expertise for the sound engineering for the upcoming Mass Effect 3.

 

sound is def awesome there...i wasn't sure if that was because of the m18x or the game itself...haha

 

Haha, definately probably both. It sounds sooo good with my headphones and DAC. Makes me almost feel like I'm back in the desert lol. I like to crank it up.

 

i cranked it up with the speakers them selves and it was pretty damn loud! and clear!

 

hi guy, is that true when i play bf3, i get ~40 fps outside and ~60fps inside. Here is my m18x :
2720qm
cf 6970
i'm using 11.10 whq and 11.9 CAP4

 

i turned off msaa on ultra settings and i get 60fps at all times, running 11.10 with no caps on 6970's

 

Is anyone else experiencing hard locks? By this I mean the game freezes and the sound starts to loop. The only way to fix it is to hard reset my m18x. I used to get once every two hours. After that last server update it is once every 45 minutes. I am running 11.10 preview 3.

 

here is some free dog tags , if anyone needs it. Finish the video & login to ea get 5 free dog tags. Act Of Valor

 

Hey guys, just wondering what settings you all are using for BF3. I've attached a picture of the settings I use, and everything is smooth for me. Just wondering how the SB CPU helps you guys out. I'm sure with a little mild OC, the 18x can destroy the game. With my settings, my CPU and GPUS never reach 80*C. When the game came out I heard all sorts of things about how it was going to be crazy demanding. I'm not seeing it. Anyhow just wanted to compare specs. I typically get 40-60FPS. Everything just feels great on this system.

Spoiler

 

DR650SE, why not 4x MSAA?

 

What kinda performance effect (Visually) will that have? I guess in all honesty I don't really know what it does, other than make things appear smoother would be my guess. Would going from 2x MSAA to 4X MSAA have a large inpact on FPS? I guess the best thing for me to do is to play around with it. I set everything to Ultra, but didn't remember setting everything else. For a while my game would freeze if I touched the video settings during multiplayer. As it is now, things are running smooth, but I'm always open for more eye candy and flexing my systems muscles.

If I can make it to Cleveland in a few weeks, an old college wrestling buddy and some friends are having a BF3 LAN party, I'd kinda like to go to it simply for the fact of bragging about my system. But I'll be that guy that has a great system, but sucks haha.

 

4x MSAA = basically, smoother edges. The difference between 2x and 4x is rather clearly visible (at least to me). I run 4x and my FPS oscillate around 50-60 FPS (see the original post), but then I run nvidia.

 

Thanks! rep+

 

Not worth the money and I don't want throttling cards. As much as I'd rather have nVIDIA this round I'm okay with the reds. If ATi plays their cards right they should be able to win the next mobile gpu round. I'mma be patient .

 

Anyone else experiencing fps lag? I am running smooth at around 60fps and then the game freezes for a couple of seconds and then drops to 1fps and then carries on. Worst of all sometimes it freezes for too long then disconnects me from the server.

At this current state the game is unplayable for me at the moment. I am on 6990's running 11.10 whql with cap 4. Anyone else have better experiences with different drivers? I am frustrated as hell.

 

Yea I have that problem, but I'm running with a gtx 560m.

 

Dr pepper has 6 sweet dogtags and 1 camo option up, 1 code on each dr pepper. so i got 3 kickass dogtags today.

Dr Pepper - EA

 

Hahaha. The Friday Fun Fun Fun is the greatest dog tag everrrr!!! Im going to be on the hunt for some Dr Pepper...

 

ughhh these dog tags are getting out of hand, its like the TF2 hats.

 

Can`t say that im that impresed by BF3 (even though im swedish)

But it runs great at High with 4aa on my m18x


_________________________
Laptop: Alienware M18X / Intel i7 2860QM (sandybridge) @3.6Ghz / 2x Radeon 6970m 2GB @750/4000 CF / OCZ SSD Agility 3 120GB / Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200rpm / 16GB Kingston HyperX 1600mhz / 18.4 HD LED / Sony Bluray.
3DMark11: 6168

 

Even though you're swedish !?

 

The game is by Swedish software house by the name of DICE

 

as of right now best possible performance for 6990m crossfire;

ultra setting with 2x msaa (basically it is a custom setting) and 11.10 drivers with CAP 4.

when the game loads go into task manager and disable the last 2 cores through affinity method, cpu 6 & cpu 7, for bf3.exe. play with vsync enabled. this will help smooth out the game.

when frame rates are at 60 or above the fps will be silky smooth. when fps dips below 60 there might be times of jerkyness. this is not normal and it is not related to multi-gpu micro stutter. there is an issue with the game that it stutters with hyperthreading. m18x bios has no option to disable hyperthreading so that is the reason messing with affinity.