How Battlefield 4 Graphic Settings Affect Your CPU and GPU

One of the advantages of working with a tight-knit group of competition players is the opportunity to dissect a game and discuss on a granular level.

One of the recent conversations the Battlefield America Competition Battalion had was on Battlefield 4 (BF4) graphic settings and how they affect the hardware we use to run the game.

We cited this informative thread on Symthic, and then Mercenary, who in real life is a professional game / graphic designer, dropped some deep knowledge on how BF4 graphic settings specifically impact your CPU and GPU. We often hear about "bottlenecks," so this is one way to alleviate it by adjusting certain settings depending on your hardware.

Mercenary gives the following advice for anyone is having gameplay issues:

• If you have a lower-end CPU:

o    Anti-aliasing (AA): Lower this setting, as it always renders off the CPU and eats up usage. Keeping it lower may make you notice more jagged edges on certain meshes, such as rails and other straight objects. AA works by supersampling higher resolutions to correct jagged edges, which are an issue in any graphics program; the CPU has to fill in those areas to smooth out the edges.

o    Mesh Quality: Lower this setting, but keep in mind running this on low can often give more problems than running medium. Often times, low on mesh or terrain settings will cause glitchy paths when walking or running armor. Test the best setting for you.

o    Ambient Occlusion (AO): This is 90% CPU dependent. This adds a level of realism by giving meshes unique shadows. Lower or disable this setting.

• If you have a lower-end GPU:

o    Network Smoothing Factor: While in the beta, it helped lower-end CPUs play smoothly, I find using this setting on a less than sufficient rig just causes issues. However, this may help someone suffering from frame rate drops in multiplayer. Keep this at 0% - 10%.

o    Lighting and Effects: These can go together with the CPU. With Frostbite, I am unsure on how lighting is done. Without speaking to a developer or seeing the actual editor, no one would really know. Often times, these tasks are placed on the CPU for optimization purposes, but this may be on the graphics as well.

o    Run Windowed Mode: While it may be funny to see the task bar while you game, this makes a huge difference in performance. A quick way of switching in and out of windowed mode is by pressing the ALT + Enter keys. Windowed mode will run at a slightly smaller resolution compared to your default. It will also disable Windows Aero effects like desktop composition, which often causes graphic performance issues when running games full screen.

Alternatively, if you're looking for more eye candy:

• If you have a strong graphics card:

o    Textures: Textures are dependent on the amount of RAM on your graphics card. I would say anything above 2 GB would be allowed to run smoothly at higher settings. If you find yourself with texture glitches, either not loading in properly or keeping up, you may want to lower these settings. Textures are literally just images, which is what takes up space in your video memory the most.

o    Resolution Scale: Anything above 100% will give more detailed graphics, versus lower is more optimized. This, in short, is a supersampler. While you may play at a resolution of 1920x1080, if this slider is set to its max of 200%, it is equivalent to viewing at 4K resolution. I don't think most graphic cards in any combination can handle values higher than 150% for more than a couple of minutes. This is a beauty setting. While it may seem silly to view the game on a 1920x1080 monitor with the graphics being downscaled from 4K, it does look beautiful. To see the results of this setting practically is through screenshots / stills. Any video uploaded to YouTube at a higher Resolution Scale setting won't make much of a difference due to the high compression on YouTube's side.

A big thank you goes out to Mercenary for providing us with this information. This should help all of us looking to get more out of BF4.