Battlefield 1 is somewhat of a departure from the usual setting, instead going backwards in time to cover a war that’s traditionally not been explored by video games. DICE and EA have re-focused their story-telling of the single player story to fall on the characters themselves, showing the people behind war in a somewhat loose historical exposition on The Great War, or WW1. Powering the experience is a natural evolution of their in-house engine, Frostbite 3.5. The result is a naturally well optimized experience. But just how optimized and smooth the experience is, we’re about to find out. Short version? It runs well on just about everything. GCN does exceptionally well, even older versions of AMD’s architecture, owing to their newfound commitment to improving drivers.
The tradition is continued with Battlefield 1
Frostbite has continued to evolve and looks quite good here in Battlefield 1. Just as in the past, there are large environments, 32km x 32km that’s rendered with 4km x 4km that you can play in, that have a fair amount of destructible structures. HBAO is used to great effect here and the entire play area in multiplayer as well as single player feels more alive than ever. Physically based lighting is also there and they’ve tweaked the particle system to make it a bit more fine grained. Things such as being gassed look quite convincing here. Models are suitably full of polygons and the texturing is the well-detailed type you’d expect. The art department took their time researching and seem to have done quite the convincing job. There are the usual amount of options you’d expect, as well, give this is Frostbite 3.5.
Also making an appearance this round is DirectX 12. Frostbite had historically been a testbed for Mantle as it was being developed, so some of the calls are similar enough that this should have some real-world results. That is, Pascal and AMD’s GCN should have a slight, if significant improvement in performance as a result. Mantle did the same for Battlefield 4.
