Battlefield 4

[cDnStealth]

Originally Posted by BigNumbers

Preloading the Closed Beta as we speak...

Cannot wait.

[Keselke]

Looks like BF3

in a different environment

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by Keselke

Looks like BF3

in a different environment

But the buildings explode!

Also the SP campaign isn't supposed to be a festering pile of QTE and bad writing, but time will tell.

I like games that try to max out my PC.

EDIT: Don't forget that volumetric water. Holy hell. And a map/squad stats running on my second monitor while in game

[Raekwon]

Waiting for open beta on Friday to make any decisions

[burn_this_city]

Been playing the beta tonight, this game is awesome!

[PsYcNeT]

Impressions:

Played 4 rounds (~2 hours) on PC. Kicked ass, pubbies are still terrible at the game. The graphics are great, was able to slam everything at Ultra with 4xMSAA and VSync with very rare frame dips.

Love:

Graphics tweaks (amazing texture work and skybox)
New vehicle ammo system
New sound FX (very thumpy)
Water & debris physics
Class layouts
New map tricks (collapsible buildings, more destructible walls/terrain, hidden bollards, elevators)
Having the map up in realtime on my second monitor

Meh:

Jetskis (kind of don't see the point on this map anyway)
Auto-hover in helicopters (doesn't work terribly well)
Spotting is more spotty (shows up on minimap but not 3D map)

Didn't like:

Current grind. Took me 2.5 rounds to gain my first level, and I got 2nd and 5th on my team respectively the first 2 rounds.

[photon]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

Having the map up in realtime on my second monitor

Wots this then??!

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by photon

Wots this then??!

When in game, Alt+Tab out to the Battlelog, and the new "server bar" (blue bar at the bottom of the window) should show a button called "battlemap". Drag your Battlelog window into your other monitor, and click on the battlemap button, and then tab back into the game. You will have both the game up on your primary monitor, and a full size realtime map up on your second.

[burn_this_city]

Well it was fun while it lasted, won't load after I lowered the video settings a bit.

[photon]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

When in game, Alt+Tab out to the Battlelog, and the new "server bar" (blue bar at the bottom of the window) should show a button called "battlemap". Drag your Battlelog window into your other monitor, and click on the battlemap button, and then tab back into the game. You will have both the game up on your primary monitor, and a full size realtime map up on your second.

Well, that may have just made EA a sale, cool!

[NuclearPizzaMan]

You can also load the map onto a secondary device like a tablet if I remember correctly. I'll be trying it tonight.

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by NuclearPizzaMan

You can also load the map onto a secondary device like a tablet if I remember correctly. I'll be trying it tonight.

Yeah I tested this out too, stuck my Nexus 10 on the table under my monitor, had to get a few books to prop it up to the right height, but it worked great, and I found was actually a bit easier to see than looking to the right at the separate monitor.

That said, the feature is stellar no matter how you use it.

[cDnStealth]

Finally a use for my second screen! With that said, I am finding the game horribly optimized. I could run BF3 at 60+FPS with max settings on my old card. I am struggling to achieve playable frame rates in BF4. That's not a huge deal as I am sure it will be fixed. I turned off AA and that's improved my performance for now.

All I have to say is that they've done some great things with my limited playing time. The sounds man! The game sounds way more like BFBC2 which has probably the best sounds in any game I've played. It's hard for me to rate the gameplay simply because I only play hardcore. Not use to having to unload so many bullets into a person.

[PsYcNeT]

I've heard some folks have been having issues with BF4, but there seem to be a couple factors that cause issues (outside of it being, well, beta):

Not having Windows 8
Not having more than 2 GB of VRAM (I clocked the ram use at 2.7 GB max on my cards)

Of course, that said, I have more hardware than any game requires to be run at 1920x1080 currently, and DICE knows how to utilize SLI out of the box.

[cDnStealth]

I've got a 2gb card but I am running windows 7 so that might be it.

[photon]

That would suck, I don't want to upgrade from Windows 7 yet.

How about having the latest beta driver from nvidia, apparently that's the "BF4" driver.

[PsYcNeT]

It's possible. Some people have had success rolling back to the 320 drivers if you have a Geforce card, while others have better performance with the current beta driver 331. The 331 drivers work stellar for me.

[cDnStealth]

I've heard mixed things about the beta driver so I am not willing to try it out. I may roll back to an earlier driver as I've read people have seen performance improvements.

[PsYcNeT]

I noticed it used 7 GB of my system RAM as well, so having 16 GB seems to be an advantage at this point in the beta.

For those interested, as mentioned above I was able to run a solid 60 (59.97) FPS w/ VSync on Ultra+4xMSAA+FXAA+HBAO using:

Windows 8 (up to date)
i5-3570k OC@4.6
2x680 Classified (4GB VRAM) OC +80 GPU +200 RAM
Installed on SSD
16GB 1866 RAM
1920x1080@59.97Hz
Geforce 331.40 BETA Driver (9/30 release)

CPU use: 98-100%
GPU use: 55-75% per card (not optimized)
RAM use: 5-7 GB
VRAM use: up to 2.7GB

[TKB]

I'm hoping to be able to run this game on max graphics, hope my system will be able to pull it off.....