Star Wars Battlefront doesn’t look terrible at lowest settings

If you were a little shocked by how high Star Wars Battlefront’s PC specifications are, you’re not alone. DICE revealed the minimum and recommended hardware baselines yesterday, with the latter requiring a beefy setup to presumably maintain a stable 60FPS at 1080p on the highest settings. But just how well does Battlefront scale when all the bells and whistles aren’t turned up to 11?

Turns out, pretty darn well. Thanks to a new comparison video ripped straight from the early access beta preceding the open one tomorrow, we have a good look at how different DICE’s Star Wars title looks at its lowest setting. Sure it’s not as crisp and detailed as the highest you can go, but if you have to make a compromise Low certainly isn’t something you’re likely to scoff at too easily.

There’s a distinct lack of detail all round and a weird haze that obscures what is likely much lower rendering for distant objects, but overall the sheen of Battlefront still manages to shine through. It’s not as terrible as one would expect.

But if you have the hardware to spare, it’s also interesting to see just how much you’re going to get out of it, right? Digital Foundry recently visited DICE at their Swedish offices, and tested out the beta on a PC they provided. Turns out the PC was equipped with a locked Core i7 4790, as well as an AMD R9 290X (single card, and around the same specifications as the GTX 970).

Putting their framerate tests to work, they found the close to recommended specifications fully capable of delivering better than expected performance.

So if you’re hitting those requirement highs, you should be set for smooth sailing at 1080p with a little room to experiment. It’s good news for everyone who isn’t exactly hitting that ceiling though, because it means maxed out, 60FPS gameplay is still within reach. But it’s also great to see that compromising on a few settings isn’t going to turn your Battlefront experience into something unbearable.

Last Updated: October 7, 2015