Star Wars Battlefront 2 Laptop and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German review, see here.

If you disregard the complaints mentioned above, "Battlefront 2" is a well-done and technically very convincing shooter, which promises some popcorn cinema and entertaining action in single player mode as well as online. While the multi-player mode was not part of our agenda, we had an opportunity to take a detailed look at the campaign ("Battlefront 1" did not have a real story yet).

In particular, the story was really surprising. In contrast to most shooters, where the story is an ornamental sideline at most and often leads us to shake our heads if we look at it closely, "Battlefront 2" presents quite an elaborate story with interesting characters, suspenseful turns, and excellently shot video sequences. This and including a soundtrack typical for the series generate the full atmospheric effect of Star Wars.

Similar to many other games by EA ("Need for Speed Payback," "FIFA 18," "Mass Effect Andromeda," "Battlefield 1," etc.), "Battlefront 2" is based on the powerful Frostbite 3 engine from Dice, which also shows its muscle here. In addition to the sharpness of the texture, the degree of detail, and the effects, the visual quality of the characters is also very pleasing. Even if some of the animations could have been a tad better, this is nitpicking at a high level, since there are hardly any current games that can reach the graphical quality of "Battlefront 2." In a direct comparison, one of the strongest competitors, "Call of Duty WWII," clearly remains behind.

Anyone who is hoping for a tactically demanding game play with teamwork will unfortunately be disappointed. Even at the higher difficulty levels, "Battlefront 2" still feels quite casual, since most of the time it is still about dull shooting, and the AI deserves the characterization "functional" at most.  At least the missions of the single player campaigns turn out very creative in terms of the visual variation. For example, the various planet surfaces are designed to be extremely atmospheric. The fights on the ground are interchanged with some nifty flight scenes, the control of which is slightly too hyper-sensitive and spongy for our tastes though. 

Back to the technology. It is not surprising that "Battlefront 2" offers a very mature impression overall, since the Frostbite 3 engine has been continuously improved and developed over the years. We did not struggle with any crashes or graphic errors. We only noticed that the videos tended to hang (probably a section of the level is prepared in the background) and after loading it, the game stutters for a few seconds, independent of the hardware used. 

The graphics menu, which brings to mind the computers from "Alien Isolation" due to its cinematic shimmering style of the writing, leaves a good impression. Even though the separate settings lack the corresponding comparison images, such as those offered by "Assassin's Creed Origins" for example, you are not completely left alone, thanks to the brief information text. In addition, "Battlefront 2" offers several presets for convenient adjustment of the overall quality.

Anyone who wants to do it themselves will discover numerous additional options, from ambient occlusion up to the texture qualities. In addition, the shooter scores with controls for brightness, viewing angle, motion blur, and movie effects. They also thought of the resolution (optional down-sampling and up-scaling), the image mode, frequency, and vertical synchronization. There are even three modes for color-blind users. For smoothing edges, "Battlefront" uses the rather mediocre TAA post-processing solution, which at least works better than the conventional FXAA though.

We particularly like that changes in the graphics settings do not require a restart, but are directly implemented (after a little stuttering), which saves time. You will need that time for the download in particular, which totals 55 GB for the release. With an SSD, we would call the load times of the saved games "average," but with an HDD, it can take noticeably longer. 

It is also a bit unfortunate that the graphics menu lacks a VRAM display. Even though 4 GB are sufficient for maximum details according to our tests, this is only up to the Full HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. At higher amounts of pixels, the graphics cards without 6 to 8 GB of VRAM slow down noticeably. This trend is particularly extreme in the 4K range of 3840x2160 pixels (see GeForce GTX 980, GTX 970M, and GTX 1050, for example).

The developers should also be able to improve the DirectX-12 support. As it has often happened in the past, the performance of the DX12 tends to be worse rather than better. For this reason, all of our benchmarks were created in the DirectX-11 mode, which is the default anyway.

Our speed measurements are based on the beginning of the seventh campaign mission, which is called Royalty and plays on the planet Naboo. Thanks to the highly detailed and hotly contested market place, this sequence belongs to the more demanding ones of the game. However, we cannot call it a worst-case scenario. As you can see in the video, for almost 30 seconds we are following a route we set ourselves, which leads around the edge of the market place without any opposition. 

Even though the shooter still looks halfway decent even in minimum detail, we can notice various differences between the different levels. Thanks to good shadows and textures, "Battlefront 2" offers fairly good performance from medium details. At the high and maximum levels, the graphics quality is increased further, be it in terms of the illumination, the density of objects, or the presentation of the distances.