AMD Radeon 6990 Review - Battle Forge

Battle Forge

Battle Forge is the free-to-play RTS from Electronic Arts. It offers a steampunk/fantasy RTS experience, where armies are build based on "decks" of cards similar to the Magic: The Gathering card game.

Battle Forge is one of AMD's spotlight (my terminology) games, as it offers both DX11 and proper Eyefinity support. The game offers a number of DX11 features, and a wealth of options for tuning performance. Specifically, Battle Forge uses DX11 and Shader Model 5.0 to compute HighDefinition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO). For our tests we maxed out all of the settings and forced DX11 through the config.xml file.

Very few of the cards in this range are taxed in widescreen. At max settings, all of the cards are breaking past 30fps. And, all of the CFX configurations are blowing past 60fps. Turn down a couple of settings and any current card should be able to hit 60fps.

Eyefinity continues to tax these cards, with only the CFX configurations hitting 30fps, and nothing crossing 60fps.

Below is a table that outlines the performance difference between the Radeon HD 6990 and the comparable SKUs. For example, the Radeon HD 6990 provides a 5fps improvement over an Eyefinity6 CFX configuration in 5x1600x900, and that represents a 15% increase over that Eyefinity6 CFX configuration.