Results: Battlefield 3 And F1 2012

A single frame that takes more than 50 ms to render in Battlefield 3 can easily get you shot. Deceptively, average frame rates that look playable often aren't. When we dug into our Fraps logs, we immediately saw that even our fastest configuration tripped over a number of frames that hung for longer than 60 ms.

Our next page will explore in greater depth whether the 50 FPS average rate we achieved using Low detail settings is truly smooth.

Battlefield 3 performance improves as memory data rate goes up, despite the fact that the on-board GPU isn't very fast.

We've seen F1 2012 bottlenecked by memory before, but this title can also suffer from CPU and graphics imbalances if you use slow-enough components.

With its dual-module CPU and desktop-derived GPU on the same piece of silicon, AMD's A10-5800K plays through F1 2012 with alacrity. We recommend using at least DDR3-1866 to reach 1920x1080.

The Ultra quality preset is worth considering at 1280x720, though you're going to encounter higher frame times, which could land you in a wall.