Greetings, everyone.\r
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Today we have with us the Battlefield 1 Open Beta, finally, so its time to do some testing.\r
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The game uses the latest iteration of the Frostbite engine and those of you familiar with it will see that most of the good stuff is still here in BF1.\r
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But first off, herere my current PC specs:\r
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-CPU: i5 4690K@4.4 GHz (Turbo) with Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO.\r
-Mobo: Asus Maximus VII Ranger.\r
-GPU: Asus GTX 770 DirectCU II OC 2 GB with no extra OC and latest WHQL driver (372.70).\r
-RAM: 16 GB DDR3@1866, 9-10-9-28.\r
-Storage: Kingston SSDNow 300, 240 GB where both game and O.S. are installed.\r
-O.S: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64bit with latest updates.\r
-Game running at 1080p/144 Hz\r
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The standard video options menu has all we were expecting coming from previous games using this engine: we have all our resolution and refresh rate options available, VSYNC too if you want to use it, then the Field of View options are offered for both first person infantry and then another setting just for third person vehicle camera, and also were presented with both the vertical and the hor+ values; for those who dont understand what Hor+ means, is the most common way of adjusting FOV in games usually, where the vertical FOV is fixed (usually at something like 78.9 degrees) and then the horizontal FOV is adjusted automatically, and this is what this game does, indeed. Good stuff to have, always, thank you for this, DICE.\r
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So, as usual, I start testing the Low preset (we also have Medium, High, Ultra, Auto and Custom), and the Auto one seems to be medium settings on my GTX 770. On lowest settings, the game doesnt look too bad at all, something we already saw happen in Battlefront, because the textures are rendered using photogrammetry and that also saves quite a bit of memory and all that interesting stuff, while at the same time still looking quite fine at low settings. Performance wise, low settings were giving me an average of 100 FPS which is more than what I was expecting with my oldie 770.\r
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So, with Medium settings things are still quite playable at around 70-80 FPS most of the time, minor improvements on textures, more noticeable ones in post effects and of shadows in general, smooth experience altogether.\r
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High settings are where my 770 starts to dip below 60 FPS at times, this is why I start lowering the resolution scale from 100% which, in the beta, is ually labeled as 42% (this is very important, since many players are already upping that to 50 or more and then complain about performance issues). With resolution scale reduction equivalent to that of 720p, I get more than 100 FPS with the High preset, and around 70 FPS with the equivalent scale to that of 900p, not bad because the game still looks quite decent despite the upscaling done from the lower scale to my native 1080p, I could barely tell the difference with all thats going on all the time in the battlefield.\r
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So, Ultra settings with a lower resolution scale is still doable here, and keeping 60 FPS at Ultra is possible if the scale is lower than 42% (100 ually, remember), so this gives us lots of options to play with…like more particle effects, higher textures and meshes…but with lower scale to compensate and keep a steady 60 frame rate. Good stuff indeed, for those who want a bit of everything.\r
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As a final note to my video this time, something a bit negative to say about the game…while VRAM and CPU usage seem relatively in check most of the time, RAM usage is not, Im afraid; for starters, normal RAM usage at any preset seems quite high, like more than 10 GB easily, but after playing for 3+ hours nonstop I noticed a RAM usage of almost 100%, literally all of my 16 GB were being used by my whole system, with only BF1 running. Of course my O.S. gave me a warning but the game still didnt crash…at least thats alright, but I had to restart the game so things could go back to normal. Perhaps theres a memory leak, who knows, or simply the beta is still not fully optimized, Im not sure if therere official system requirements posted somewhere but I assume the RAM requirement will be pretty hefty considering things.\r
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Anyway, as usual, I hope you guys liked this video and enjoy the game this week, and Ill see you next time : )
