A non-disclosure agreement is created for those times where certain people need to receive information, get demonstrations, and so forth before the organization wishes to release to the public. We respect the wishes of the individuals and organizations that provide us with information that assists us with our jobs. Currently Battlefield 3 is undergoing private Alpha testing for a select number of invitees – I am not one of those invitees (at least, as of the time of this writing) and thus have no obligation to keep silent on information that was leaked to the public. That is convenient, of course, as some information leaked out on system benchmarks with a wide variety of video cards and processors pitted against DICE’s upcoming shooter.


The first thing to realize, and one of the main reasons for the non-disclosure, is that development builds are development builds: optimizations will be made that will speed things up; enhancements will be made that may make things possibly slower but better for some reason or another. Do not assume that these numbers will even closely reflect the finished product, just the state of the game as it exists right now.

That said and in mind: to expect a smooth experience at 1080p you should anticipate having a GTX 460 or Radeon 5830 as your minimum and a GTX 560 Ti or a Radeon 6950 if you want to hover at around 60 FPS. The GTX 590 actually fell well below the GTX 580 and even fell below the GTX 570 which means that SLi is not yet supported… which should be no surprise for an unreleased game! On the CPU side of things, while no Sandy Bridge processors were tested it looks like performance will hit a bit of a plateau around the 6-core Phenom IIs, upper Core i5, and lower Core i7 parts. Battlefield 3 Alpha really looks as if it appreciates four or more cores thumbing its nose at all the dual core offerings tested. If you would like to see more, check out GameGPU’s page.