Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 is a 2013 first-person shooter video game developed by Swedish video game developer EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. We ran the game at “Ultra” settings with each respected resolution, MSAA off, and in single player mode.

• Graphics Quality – Ultra
  • Texture Quality – Ultra
  • Texture Filtering – Ultra
  • Lighting Quality – Ultra
  • Effects Quality – Ultra
  • Post Process Quality – Ultra
  • Mesh Quality – Ultra
  • Terrain Quality – Ultra
  • Terrain Decoration – Ultra
  • AA Deferred – 4x MSAA
  • AA Post – High
  • Ambient Occlusion – HBAO
• V-Sync – Off

Kicking off with 1080p:

With essentially an averaged 60 FPS with BF4 maxed out, the 960 is really in the sweet spot for this game.  Of course if you’re looking to run a higher refresh rate monitor you would need to turn some settings down.
GPU usage is solidly high with the only dropouts being during scene transitions.  Frametimes also look nice and clean:

Now let’s look at 4K:

17.5FPS is of course low, but it’s not “OMG No VRAM low”.  In checking the logs though we do see that the 960 was essentially maxed out on VRAM, however this doesn’t necessarily mean that it was out of VRAM merely that some cached textures hadn’t been ejected yet.  Bear in mind that at 4K we were still maxing the settings and so with the settings turned down the 960 might even be “playable” at 4k – very much a surprise!

We want to stress that these benches were run in campaign mode, your results may vary in multiplayer mode. It’s tough to announce a game as “playable” since everyone has different opinions on what FPS is required for a game to be playable. We think that 30FPS is the bare minimum you want as an average, with 60FPS being preferable. At 1080p the GTX 960 SSC easily surpasses those minimums and is right on target. At 4K however, that number is cut down by more than a third and hovers below the magic 30 FPS line. While we found that we were able to play at 4K resolution and could progress through the game without many issues, we knew it’d be gameover if we tried to play online in mulitplayer matches. We’re pretty confident in assuming that most Battlefield 4 owners bought it for the online experience compared to just the campaign, that being said we therefore recommend turning down the settings a bit and perhaps not venturing into 4K with this GPU.