Battleforge: Introduction
Battleforge is developed by Phenomic, who already have been responsible for the popular Spellforce. Their new mixture of real-time strategy and trading card game is quite interesting from a technical point of view since it supports DirectX 10.1, which is currently supported by AMD's HD 3000 and HD 4000 series only. Furthermore Battleforge offers SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and multi-core optimizations.

Battleforge: The integrated benchmark
Battleforge offers an integrated benchmark that can be found in the video options. But since this sequence is quite challenging, results over 20 fps indicate that the game will run smooth in almost any situation. The "Average Fps” stated in the results are not comparable to a recording with Fraps, because they are calculated from the frametimes. Therefore we used Fraps for our benchmarks.

Battleforge: Benchmark results
Due to D3D10.1 the Radeons that support it are doing really well, although the minimal framerate is always a little lower than the one of the Geforces. Nevertheless a HD 4870 is competing with a Geforce GTX 285 instead of the GTX 260-216 as it usually is the case - the difference between 512 and 1,024 MiByte VRAM are almost insignificant. If you don't activate 4x MSAA even a HD 3870 is fast enough to reach the performance of an 8800 GT. If you want to use even weaker cards, you can deactivate SSAO - that almost doubles the framerate.

Conclusion: Battleforge is - due to D3D10.1 - a playground for modern Radeon graphics cards.

Select setting by clicking

  1.680 x 1.050/1x MSAA + 16:1 AF     1.680 x 1.050/4x MSAA + 16:1 AF