Although Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a very demanding game, it is not nearly as horrible on hardware as Crysis. For example, at 2560x1600 using maximum visual quality settings with 2xAA/4xAF the Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire setup averaged 74fps in this new game. The exact same hardware averaged just 48fps in Crysis Warhead with AA/AF settings disabled. 2 Another example using the GeForce GTX 260 saw a 47fps average when testing with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1680x1050, while playing Crysis allowed for just 33fps with AA/AF disabled.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 doesn't scale down very well, as we saw roughly a ~5 fps performance gain when going from the high to the medium quality preset. At the same time, there was very little difference in graphics quality or detail. When going from the medium to the low quality settings we saw anywhere from a 10 – 20fps increase, which allowed graphics cards as slow as the Radeon HD 4830 or GeForce GT 240 to deliver an acceptable level of performance at 1680x1050.

We also tried running some of the slower cards at a 1280x1024 resolution at high and medium settings, but the performance boost was not very significant. Similarly than when going from high to medium, a ~5 fps average increase was noted when decreasing the resolution. Like many first person shooters the CPU doesn't play a huge role in this game's performance, therefore a decent dual-core processor should be enough to power even the latest graphics cards at full speed. As the resolution was increased the game became even more GPU bound, removing the CPU from the equation almost entirely.