[GeneralAres]

Battlefield 2: The Video Card Controversy

As a PC Gamer you expect to upgrade, you expect that at some point your hardware will not run the latest games acceptably. Battlefield 2 does not even give you that option. It attempts to make all non DirectX 9 compatible video cards obsolete. Which means all GeForce 4 and older video cards will not run Battlefield 2. You cannot even start up the menu. Neither Electronic Arts nor the game's developer DICE have any plans to fix this. Even though the GeForce 4 line of video cards has enough horsepower to render the game it is not compatible with Pixel Shader 1.4. Emulation to Pixel Shader 1.3 would easily make the game playable on these cards but redundant texture checks make this difficult to implement.

The response from Electronic Arts on the Issue was:

"We've been talking to Benjamin Smith on the development team about this. There are no plans to implement GeForce 4 support in a patch. The engine was not built to run acceptably (performance or appearance-wise) on the GeForce 4 series of cards."

Then why does it run on slower cards such as the ATi Radeon 8500? The performance of this card is no better then the GeForce 4 line except for the inclusion of Pixel Shader 1.4 support. (read more)

This sucks

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If you have a geforce 4 you it wouldnt play well at all so i can see where they are coming from when you can get a card upgrade for 50 to 100 pounds that would play bf2 why would you run it on a geforce4 and spoil all the hard work the developers put into the game to make it look so great.

[warriorscot]

If you have a geforce 4 you it wouldnt play well at all so i can see where they are coming from when you can get a card upgrade for 50 to 100 pounds that would play bf2 why would you run it on a geforce4 and spoil all the hard work the developers put into the game to make it look so great.

[GeneralAres]

Not necessarily, as you can see here a GF4Ti is faster then a Radeon 9600 and a GF5700.

[mycompsux]

Those BF2 video card statistics are staggering.

Edited by mycompsux, 23 July 2005 - 11:43 AM.

[starjax]

wow... I used to have an ati 8500. I upgraded to a ati 9600xt so I could play HL2.

Its staggering to see people playing with 440 (geforce 4) cards with todays modern games. I'm looking to upgrade my 9600 to something like a x800.

or let me put it in another perspective.... what was the most popular game when the geforce 4 came out... quake 3.

its been this way for a long time. new cards get released and gamers program for them. then they want more technology, physics, ect and the hw is made to do that. its a viscous cycle. unless you shell out a lot of money for a top end card then only about 2 years is all the usefull playing time you can get from it.

I know way to many people who will go and spend money so they can game with the latest hw. really thats how the market is driven.

save up and upgrade your hw. everything else is just semantics.

[GeneralAres]

If you read what this is about it is a unique case where the GF4 cards are powerful enough to run the game but simply laziness on the programmers have made it incompatible.

[warriorscot]

Yeah but they have a deadline if it is made compatible for older cards we would never had the game. And the geforce 4 careds are definatley moving out of circulation. Although its actual performance that counts when playin hl2 my old fx5200 looked much better than a friends gf4.

[GeneralAres]

What we are talking about here would have delayed the release marginally a few months at most.

[starjax]

oh general you make laugh and cry. Obviously you don't understand how games get published, distributed and financed. not to mention that at some point the developers have to make a choice on what and where to cut. so the owners of those older cards can't play bf2. the cost of upgrading to a playable card is pretty cheap.

besides would you play bf2 if it looked like bf1? or desert combat?

[GeneralAres]

Sorry the argument doesn't work when I can play HL-2 and Doom 3 perfectly fine. Not to mention I can run BFV (which was released last year) on high detail settings. No I understand how it works too well, especially when EA has something to do with it.

[warriorscot]

You also dont understand how gfx cards are designed as well, just because they have the power is unimportant power isnt the issue it is the architecture refinement when gf4s were out the hardware was way beyond the software now the software is catching up you cant honestly expect it to run new software. And extra months would be infeasible bf2 was released so all us teen and twenty somethings could play it over the summer hols if it was delayed a few months sales would have been less. HL2 and doom 3 are games that had a production cycle of years, they have been working on hl2 since hl1 was released. battle field vietnam also wasnt a new engine with ultra refined graphics it was something to tide the market over until bf2 was released.

[GeneralAres]

Battlefield 2's graphics are hardly ultra-refined. The delay would have been minimal, in less then a month some fans have converted half the shaders in the game. DICE's developement team would have taken next to no time. Obviously the visuals would not look as good on the GF3/4 line but that is not the point, the fact that you cannot even start the game is.

[starjax]

general are you a high level programmer or game developer?

[warriorscot]

Yeah have you ever tried to develop any kind of software at all. The game is ultra refined as you would see if you had seen it at high settings. If i was a game developer and had just spent years of my life creating something that looks amazinhg and plays great i wouldnt want people to play it at settings so low it looks like the last version of the game or worse. Some fans most of the time those some fans number 10 times the number of programmers on the original project.

If you want it to play on a geforce 4. FIX IT YOURSELF. If you had a cpu and ram from the geforce4 era it would barely play bf2 anyway.

[GeneralAres]

The game is ultra refined as you would see if you had seen it at high settings.

Please.

If i was a game developer and had just spent years of my life creating something that looks amazinhg and plays great i wouldnt want people to play it at settings so low it looks like the last version of the game or worse.

Except they didn't spend years making this. They updated the engine, stole the Desert Combat content and repackaged it.

If you had a cpu and ram from the geforce4 era it would barely play bf2 anyway.

Completely not true with the Shader Mod it plays ultra smooth.

Edited by GeneralAres, 26 July 2005 - 05:24 PM.