Battlefield 2142

Author: Ryan Garside
Published: 3rd November 2006
Comments (34) Stumble

Graphical Options

Battlefield 2142 is not the most beautiful game out there. It's based on the same engine as Battlefield 2 (released over a year ago in June 2005). The new game boasts some tweaks to the graphical engine but nothing too major, imagine this game as more of a step, rather than a leap forward in graphical engineering. Same body, just a few nicer clothes.

We at bit-tech like to provide screen shots of how the game will look at different settings so you can judge for yourself what you will be satisfied. We'll provide you with information on what kind of computer you will need to run at these settings before going into a little more detail about what graphical options you will be able to tinker with on the next page.

Highest Setting

Battlefield 2142 Graphical Options Battlefield 2142 Graphical Options
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At the highest possible settings the game look pretty slick. Surprisingly it wasn't hugely taxing and our gaming rig was able to run this comfortably whilst in game (averaging around 40fps). Also, there is no option to set a widescreen resolution. This is with good reason, widescreen resolutions allow certain players to see more of the game at once. Developers, DICE, felt this was an unfair advantage and so deemed it as a cheat.

Tough luck for all you who have shelled out on a widescreen monitor and the best you'll be able to do is set a custom resolution (to do this check out this Widescreen Gaming Forum). After setting a custom resolution by editing the shortcut command line, you don't actually get a true widescreen gaming experience - it effectively stretches the picture to fit your monitor's resolution, but doesn't alter the field of view. This means that widescreen gamers gain no advantage over players that aren't fortunate enough to have a widescreen monitor.

Medium Setting

Battlefield 2142 Graphical Options Battlefield 2142 Graphical Options
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Medium settings see us knock anti-aliasing off, and lower all of the in game options sliders to medium. The visual difference isn't absolutely massive, though is certainly noticeable. The difference running games on medium settings will make to the game performance however is drastic.

My FPS practically doubled when I dropped to the lower resolution of 1280x960 and this increase had a notable affect on my in game performance. Even though I could run the game on maxed out settings I still enjoyed this experience and would be quite happy to sit at home and play on these settings. To run at this level comfortably I was using a Pentium 4 3GHz, 1GB of memory and a GeForce 7600 GT (this could be substituted for an ATI Radeon X1650 Pro / XT).

Lowest Setting

Battlefield 2142 Graphical Options Battlefield 2142 Graphical Options
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The same cannot be said for the lowest settings. With all options dropped to low and the resolution down to 800x600 the game looked pig ugly. I say this in all of our graphical analysis but if your machine can only just run the game on minimum settings then you really ought to ignore paying for this game and save up your pennies for a new PC. It would be a heinous crime to play this game at these settings, a blocky mess, a fun-less black-hole. Take a look at the picture and marvel at its revoltingness.

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