Looking Back Pt. 3: The 6800 Ultra, ForceWare, and the Future

Battlefield 2

As the newest game in our latest investigation, Battlefield 2 is almost too new to include. With only a handful of drivers released in the lifetime of the game, there's a lack of data points to work with to draw a strong conclusion. Given the number of requests to include this game, however, we have tested it with all of the drivers released since its launch. As a primarily large multiplayer game, Battlefield 2 strikes an interesting balance between the desire for high quality graphics and the need to be able to render a large firefight without slowing a system to a crawl. Battlefield 2 also is a unique game out of everything that we've tested because it's the only game here that requires pixel shading, whereas everything else merely uses the ability if it's there.

Given the rapid rise to popularity that Battlefield 2 gained upon release, it's of little surprise that NVIDIA took a chance to optimize their drivers here. What is interesting is that in most games the largest performance improvements come with HQ settings as opposed to running with everything turned off, but that is not the case here. Instead we have a rare inversion where there is a greater improvement when AA/AF are turned off, which would further confirm BF2's status as a game heavily GPU dependant.

ForceWare 77.72 versus 84.21
Mouse over for 84.21

Our image quality tests continue to be a case of "no news is good news." There was no change in render output even with the change in performance.