In terms of performance, we did feel that it is a bit more demanding than BF4 on the whole. It seems like we are having to run at lower settings in this game, compared to BF4. It certainly felt like performance was slower in this one with the current generation of video cards we have. It took high-end video cards to run smoothly at 1440p with the highest in-game settings. At 4K even the new GeForce GTX TITAN X cannot run this game and will need more GPU horsepower to enjoy 4K gaming.

When it comes down to finding out what is the best video card for this game, you have to break it down into what target display will you be using. If you are going to be doing 4K gaming, right now SLI and CrossFire are not providing great scaling at 4K. Your best choice is the single-GPU GeForce GTX TITAN X until scaling is improved. Otherwise, even with GTX 980 SLI and R9 290X CrossFire you will be pressing for more performance to enjoy the game.

If you are going for 1440p gameplay, the GTX 980 was faster than the R9 290X and allowed a higher in-game setting. Between the R9 290X and GTX 970 though, the gameplay experience was the same. Therefore, we'd opt for the less expensive AMD Radeon R9 290X as a better value over the GTX 970 at 1440p for this game.

If you are targeting 1080p you cannot beat the awesomeness of the AMD Radeon R9 280X. Prices have fallen on these video cards, and it beats anything NVIDIA has at that price range. If you want more performance though, the AMD Radeon R9 290 at 1080p would be even faster for 1080p gaming. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 960 and AMD's Radeon R9 285 are basically slow for this game even at 1080p.

Any card less than those is going to either require you drop in-game settings a lot, or drop resolution.

We did not find that Battlefield Hardline uses an exorbitant amount of VRAM in the maps. We only exceeded 4GB of VRAM at 4K with 4X MSAA, which wasn't playable on any video card. At 1440p it can maximize 3GB or just over 3GB of VRAM. At 1080p though, it can certainly use over 2GB of VRAM if the video card has more than 2GB on board. It seems at 1080p with 4X MSAA 2GB may be limiting. The R9 280X used over 2GB of VRAM at that setting, showing its advantage with the 3GB of VRAM on board.

It seems that our advice as far as VRAM goes, if you are going to game at 4K you will want a video card that has over 4GB of VRAM on it, so 6GB video cards would be perfectly fine. For 1440p 4GB video cards would be best, to allow these to go slightly past 3GB of usage. For 1080p it is clear 3GB is needed so that these can exceed 2GB when running 1080p with 4X MSAA. 2GB video cards are starting to show their limitations at 1080p.