More info for gfx etc. release of bc2 (wall of txt warning)

At last some confirmation for a customisable FOV!

Source: http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/battlefield_bad_company/archive/2010/02/19/bad-company-2-pc-graphics-details.aspx?PageIndex=2#comments

Introduction

My name is Johan Andersson (Twitter: repi <http://twitter.com/repi>) and
I'm one of the architects working on our proprietary Frostbite engine
here at DICE <http://www.dice.se>.

We've had numerous requests to go through in more detail about what kind
of graphical features & options that exists in Battlefield: Bad Company
2 for the PC. So this is an attempt at just that.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is based on Frostbite 1.5, but with multiple
enhancements and a lot of specific effort spent on building it up and
for the PC as this is the first time Frostbite is used on PC.

DX9/DX10/DX11

Frostbite 1.5 on PC is designed for DirectX 10 as a base, this enables
us to easily support all the advanced graphics features that we use on
the consoles, and much more! DX10 is a very modern graphics API and
gives us a lot of flexibility as a developer.

DX10 has one unfortunate draw back though; it is only supported on
Windows Vista and Windows 7, not the now 9 year old Windows XP. And as
we have a big PC fan base, where not everyone may have transitioned over
to Vista or Windows 7 yet, we have also added a rendering path that uses
the old DirectX 9.

The DX9 path is quite efficient but lacks some of the features that we
have on DX10 like anti-aliasing and HBAO.


For everyone with the new generation of graphics card, like the AMD
Radeon 5xxx series or the upcoming Nvidia Geforce 4xx, we've also added
support for DirectX 11. The primary uses of DX11 in Bad Company 2 is to
soften all the dynamic shadows as well as to improve performance in
general with a few smaller DX11 optimizations that we are using.

The detection and usage of DX9/DX10/DX11 is done automatically, the game
selects the highest possible version available with your graphics card
and OS. If you want to force a given path you can do that in the
Settings.ini file by setting 'DxVersion' to any of these options: /9/,
/10/, /11/ or /auto/ (default).

The Settings.ini file can be found in My Documents\BFBC2 directory.

AMD Eyefinity

Bad Company 2 supports AMD's Eyefinity rendering mode
<http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/eyefinity/Pages/eyefinity.aspx>
where you can have 3 (or 6!) monitors connected to a single graphics
card. The game will then detect that mode and the very wide aspect ratio
and render using a wide horizontal field of view and keep the menus &
HUDs on the middle display. This can create a very immersive experience
if you have the hardware required.

Elmnator1 posted this Youtube video showing Eyefinity in the Bad Company
2 PC Beta on his nice setup:

Nvidia 3D Vision

We've been working together with engineers from Nvidia for adding proper
support for 3D Vision stereo rendering
<http://www.nvidia.com/object/3D_Vision_Main.html> in Bad Company 2 PC.
This support is not enabled in the beta but it will be included in a
patch shortly after the release of the retail game.

3D Vision works by rendering a picture for each eye every frame together
with a slight offset. Then the 3D glasses together with the compatible
displays and drivers correctly select which frame each eye sees to
create actual depth perception in the game.

We are also looking forward to trying out the upcoming multi-monitor
stereo rendering: 3D Vision Surround
<http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/01/surround-yourself-with-nvidia-3d-vision-technology.html>.

Expect to see & hear more about both 3D Vision and 3D Vision Surround in
Bad Company 2 after the beta!

HBAO

HBAO stands for Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion and is a rendering
technique developed by Nvidia originally and that we have integrated
into Frostbite for use on all DX10 and DX11 graphics cards.

It is a technique that creates soft & realistic contact shadows between
objects and can really enhance the visuals but in a quite subtle way. It
can be a demanding effect for the graphics card and as such is primarily
meant for more higher-end cards. It only is a cost on the GPU, not the CPU.

Since the PC Beta we've done a bunch of optimizations on the effect
together with both Nvidia and AMD, so if you had performance problems
with it before: please give it a shot again in the retail game if you
have a modern & fast GPU!

For the full technical details about how HBAO works, see this
presentation by Nvidia from SIGGRAPH 2008: Image-Space Horizon-Based
Ambient Occlusion
<http://developer.nvidia.com/object/siggraph-2008-HBAO.html>.

Field of View

BC2 uses approximately the same /vertical/ field-of-view on all
platforms and modes. But as we support arbitrary monitor aspect ratios,
you can get different /horizontal/ FOV on different monitor setups - the
wider monitor you have the wider horizontal FOV you get, i.e. you
actually see more on the sides of the screen.

As widescreen monitors nowadays are even more common (and actually: the
new standard) we felt it was very important to support them properly.
Which we do in BC2 thanks to handling arbitrary aspect ratios. A
positive side effect of this is that Eyefinity also works as it should,
i.e. just like a single /very/ wide monitor.

We've seen overwhelming positive feedback for the out-of-the-box support
of Eyefinity, but a few select people have voiced some concern that the
wide FOV when playing with Eyefinity would be considered cheating. But
now when people have been playing the Beta we haven't heard any feedback
that Eyefinity have actually been a big practical competitive advantage,
it is meant to give you only extra peripheral vision.

The PC as a platform is inherently not a 100% fair playing field as
people have always had varying performance, network connection, hardware
setups, input devices and new technology - which is also one of the
strengths of the platform and something we, and many PC players, would
like us to embrace & utilize.

If the community later collectively agrees that Eyefinity is an actual
big advantage in multi-player we can look into potentially having it as
a server option, but don't think that will be needed.


Another much requested topic is to have a customizable FOV. This is not
implemented in the PC Beta, but we are adding a customizable FOV for a
future retail patch. The feedback from the Beta about servers,
performance & stability have been of a higher priority and needed to be
solved first.

Misc

The 'High' texture detail level is not included in the PC beta, but is
in the retail game which increase texture resolution a bit.

Support for multiple GPUs (AMD Crossfire / Nvidia SLI) in the first PC
Beta build was only partially working and could cause visual artifacts.
This is improved on in the latest Beta client and since that version we
have done additional performance scaling improvements that should be a
good benefit.

We would like to thank both AMD and Nvidia for their technical support
and assistance during the development of Bad Company 2. Both with the
PC-only advanced features and with helping to make sure the game runs
and performs well a wide range of graphics cards and configurations.
Special thanks to Louis Bavoil (Nvidia) and Nicolas Thibieroz (AMD).

Future

If you are interested in more details about DirectX 11 as well as some
sneak peaks and technical details about our upcoming Frostbite 2 engine,
AMD recently did a big interview with me in their on the AMD Underground
blog: "11 Days of DirectX 11: DICE"
<http://blogs.amd.com/how-to/2009/11/16/11-days-of-directx%C2%AE-11-day-six-dice/>.
The longer full interview is also available as an pdf here
<http://game.amd.com/us-en/content/images/play/gameassets/DICE/DICE_11Days_Interview.pdf>


Keep in mind that the interview is about the future, beyond Bad Company 2.

-- repi[i]

Did you see the video of the guy with 3 screens?


My Gpu supports this so I might get a couple of screens from work and give it a go.

trying to get the same brightness and colour settings for 3 monitors would take a bit of time if they are different brands /models

The side ones aren't as important as they are more periphial vision (really gives you an added advantage) whereas the centre still remain with what yiou generally see.

If you have in eyefinitey Rocka, you will need monitors with display ports in the rear but i do have a link somewhere for a round about way to get it going using std monitors and a apple display pot fitting.
The HP monitors which have DP's are damned expensive atm but soon a lot of monitors will have them.

I also know of a couple of guys who have 2 nvidia cards in their machines who get the same result. The more powerful card doing the main and 1 periphial and the less powerful doing the other side.