As you may already know, one of the best ways to benchmark PCs nowadays is by running 3D games. If you are comparing video cards, the use of real 3D games is imperative. Battlefield 2142, which was released last month, is the latest game under Battlefield franchise, making a very interesting choice to test the 3D performance of your system. In this tutorial we will teach you how to use this game to benchmark your PC.

Battlefield 2142 is based on the same engine as Battlefield 2. So in theory you could use the same methods used to benchmark Battlefield 2 on Battlefield 2142. The problem, however, is that Battlefield 2142 doesn’t come with any demos and utilities created for Battlefield 2 won’t run on Battlefield 2142 since file and folder names are different and also because Battlefield 2 demos won’t run on Battlefield 2142. Also, since Battlefield 2142 was just released, no benchmarking utility was released so far.

To make things worse, the benchmarking module included on Battlefield 2142 is flawed. Just to give you an idea, after recording our own demo and playing it five times using Battlefield 2142’s internal benchmarking module, we would get five totally different results. For instance, we recorded a demo based on Suez Channel map and we got five different results: 52.55, 44.47, 56.26, 117.93 and 145.44. As we can see, we are not talking about a slight difference, which is normal, but completely crazy results (especially if you keep in mind that this game has an internal 100 FPS lock, so it can’t produce more than 100 FPS if this lock isn’t disabled).

So, how to use Battlefield 2142 to benchmark your PC? First you will need to create your own demo, with at least 30 seconds. Second, you will need to edit your demo to add a new camera track. Third, you need to run FRAPS. And finally you need to run your demo under the video configuration you want to measure (resolution and image quality). We did this and we could get very consistent results, i.e., running the same demo five times the difference between the results was negligible (below 1%).

You don’t want to go thru the hassle of creating your own demo, creating a new camera track and learning the commands to run your demo? No problem. You can download our very own demo, based on Sidi Power Plant map. This is a long demo were we drive a truck from one side of the map to the other, presenting a very consistent number of frames per second. On our zip package you will find all necessary files to automate as much as we can the benchmarking process. We will give you detailed instructions on how to install and run our demo and how to benchmark your system with it. Do you want to create your own demo? No problem, we will teach you how to do this as well, if you want to go thru this.