 So guys, I'm doing my Battlefield 3 benchmarking this weekend. Right now I've got the 6970 on the test bench. So I'm using my Core i7 2600K test bench. I'm running the CPU at stock speed for this one. The cards that I'm benching are the 590, 580, 570, 560Ti, 550, 6990, 6970, 6950, and the 6870. So the settings I'm using are the high preset in Battlefield 3, just because I wanted something that was going to be not quite so high end that I might run into framebuffer issues. I wanted to get a good idea of how the game performs on all of these GPUs relative to each other. So high settings and I'm running at 1080p. So my benchmark sequence is on the level, I think it's called comrade, something like that, whatever this level is called. And then as soon as I get out of the car here, I'm going to start and he's going to shoot the guy and then I'm going to get out of the car. So I'll start, I'll do my run through and then I'm going to record two minutes of FRAPS gameplay that I play the same way every time. The repeatability of this particular benchmark can be done to within about 0.5 of a frame per second. So that's what I would consider the margin of error, about 0.5 to 1 frame per second. So I'm going to follow him. I'm going to have to apologize in advance for my gameplay here, my mouse sensitivity is off and oh cat go away. Okay hopefully that doesn't interfere. You know what, I'll probably have to redo this run off camera. But I just want to show you guys the general run through. Whenever my cats don't interfere, things go a little bit more smoothly. So wait for the car to go and then I'm going to go pillar to pillar and try and see if there's any guys to shoot and just keep moving up until I gain this position here. At which point I will fight these guys, well rather shoot them while they're not looking. And then I will fight the guys that come up the stairs. Duck back here a little bit, kill this guy. You can tell I'm playing on easy right? Like one shot to the guy's hip and he goes down. Oh that's not usually the way I go. Come over here, look over here, come back here, kill this dude. Now the autosave is kicked in. This game was really hard to find a good place to benchmark for two minutes straight because what I really like to have is a checkpoint so that I don't have to sit through a cinematic sequence in between GPUs every time. But I wasn't able to find a single two minute long uninterrupted segment of play. Absolutely ridiculous. And I killed those guys too quickly so I'm just going to kind of stand here and shoot a little bit because the fraps counter shouldn't reappear until I get to about right here. There it goes, just like that. So yeah it was very frustrating and I do have to sit through that car sequence every time. A lot of the earlier levels especially are like in the dark and there's nothing going on but I thought this was a pretty good gameplay sequence so without further ado I will present to you guys my graphs once I'm finished re-running this one and then I think I still have the 6870 to go. So one thing that I did forget to mention when I did my initial video talking about the benchmarking procedures is that I am using the latest drivers. So that is the Catalyst 11.1 or rather 11.10 drivers from AMD and the GeForce 285.62 drivers from Nvidia. So these are the blah blah blah blah blah. You can read more about it. This is the recommended driver from Battlefield 3 and then I think on the AATI, rather AMD release notes, Battlefield 3 provides great crossfire scaling and resolves issues when running in crossfire mode. Now here come the results and where's my Excel? It's here. There's my graph. So Battlefield 3 FPS, more is better. I'm going to go ahead and give AMD major props because yes their crossfire scaling is outstanding. The 6990 performs on average at 114.8 FPS compared to the 6970 at 64.2. Now my 6990 was running without the OC switch enabled on it which means that that is near perfect crossfire scaling. Simply outstanding. Rarely, rarely seen that in any kind of a real world scenario from Nvidia or from AMD. So the 590 does scale but not as well as the 6990 and then here are the rest of the cards. So for these ones, bear in mind that these sort of equivalent GeForce and Radeon cards, equivalent in terms of performance, usually the Radeon cards tend to be a little bit cheaper so I think AMD has done a great job but I look forward to seeing what Nvidia can do to optimize their cards because generally speaking the way I have it arranged is the way I'm typically expecting to see the performance line up and that is not what I observed with Battlefield 3. We're seeing a serious equivalency between the 580 and the 6970, the 570 and the 6950 and the 560ti and the 6870. I'd say anything above a 550 is suitable for 1080p with all high presets but the 550ti did slow down during firefights. I know I don't have minimum FPS on this particular graph but this was the only one where the minimum FPS really bothered me. All of the rest of them provided a smooth gameplay experience and thank you for checking out my Battlefield 3 performance video. See there's my notes where I have my benchmarks written down. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.