 So it is near the end of the year, meaning that we have the next installment in the Battlefield franchise, namely Battlefield 1, which is actually the 5th? 8th? 12th? 240th? I don't know. Anyways, wacky naming convention aside, Battlefield 1 is a hyped enough game that it might actually get you thinking about upgrading your current system. It's absolutely beautiful. So, what hardware combo should you be looking at? Let's find out in our Battlefield 1 video card showdown featuring CPU cores and memory and like some other stuff. TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free, check the link in the video description. So Battlefield 1, like I said, it's an undoubtedly beautiful game. But what do you need hardware wise to run it well enough to make you feel like you're really in the thick of it? Mustard, gas, and all. We not only answer this question by looking at how it performed on current GPUs like we normally do from AMD and Nvidia, but also, like I said, we tried different CPU core configurations and RAM setups as well. And these benchmarks are what we'll be looking at first. For the CPU tests, we paired Intel Skylake CPUs with the new Pascal-based Titan X or Titan XP from Nvidia, as well as 32 gigs of fast DDR4 RAM to ensure we wouldn't have any other bottlenecks. At 4K and the Ultra preset, pretty much every CPU from a 10-core with hyper-threading down to a 4-core without hyper-threading performed more or less the same, with the same average frame rate hovering around 80 glorious frames per second. It's only when we drop down to a dual-core with hyper-threading, something like a Core i3, that we start to see a noticeable drop-off. And a dual-core without hyper-threading cut our frames by over 50%. So the bottom line here is that any relatively decent and recent Core i5 with four physical cores should be just fine. We also took a look at the effects of different amounts of system RAM. EA officially requires 8GB and recommends 16, but in our testing with the Titan X and stuff to remove bottlenecks, the game didn't seem to care whatsoever, even when we ran just 4 gigs of RAM. So yeah, don't sweat it. However, if you don't have a ton of memory, you may want to be careful about how many applications and browser tabs you have going on in the background. And on the subject of memory, should the pretty textures in Battlefield 1 compel you to go for a card with more than the standard ration of 4GB? To find out, we took two RX 480s, one with 4GB of VRAM and one with 8GB. Again, even on 4K Ultra, there wasn't any real difference between them, even when we disabled the in-game VRAM limiter. So we can't imagine that 12GB of VRAM would be beneficial unless you're running multiple high-resolution screens, or EA pulls modding support out of their butts. We tested current GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia, but we also tested the older GTX 660. That's the minimum recommended card from EA, so we'll see how well that works. Overall, the good news is that while Battlefield 1 is a great-looking title, you don't need the best hardware on the market to run it. Out of all the cards that we tested, the only one that wasn't really capable of running Battlefield 1 at 4K was the $115 Radeon RX 460. Everything else at least broke the 30fps threshold, though you'll want a GTX 1080 or a Titan X if you want 4K at 60fps, however crazy that is. If you're more interested in hitting the 1440p sweet spot, your most cost-effective option here is the $200 RX 470, which hits 60fps on Ultra settings. And none of our cards really broke a sweat at 1080p, except the aforementioned RX 460, which still managed a solid 45 frames per second at Ultra. If you want to break 60fps, you have to turn the settings down to about medium, which still isn't that bad. Though we did get strange artifacting at medium and low settings on multiple resolution on multiple cards, both from AMD and Nvidia. So only really use those settings if you really need to, because I don't know what the heck's going on there. Speaking of 1080p, there's good news. As long as you're not expecting to play the game at anything higher than 1080p, the 660, which was a very popular card for years, is capable of running it as EA claims, which is good. At Ultra settings, we got 33fps, though with some noticeable slowdowns when lots of explosion and whatnot were happening on the screen. Bumping it down to high got us up to 40fps and made the experience a whole lot better, especially during intense cutscenes. So that's where we'd probably recommend it if you're still using a GTX 660, especially as that way you'll avoid the weird artifacting we got at those lower presets. Anyways, moving on. If you've been waiting for a breakthrough DX12 game that really shows off the performance benefits of the new API, you'll have to keep waiting. Our AMD cards performed virtually identical DX12 and DX11, while our Nvidia cards actually got noticeably worse. The silver lining here is that if you're not rocking DX12 compatible hardware, you're not missing anything. So there you go. Overall, I think EA's done a pretty good job with Battlefield 1, all DX12 things considered. Though I wish I could say the same about their Origin DRM, which locked us out countless amounts of times from four different f***ing accounts, including one directly from EA with an EA.com email address. What the hell? This took us multiple days to benchmark, compared to normally where it would just take one little section of time. I also spent multiple sessions of time working with EA support, hence the EA account that we had to test it with, and our keys came from EA so that we could do this benchmarking. I like making these videos for you guys. I like the idea of knowing what hardware I will need for my games, and especially in one of these situations where it's coded apparently pretty damn well, as it feels like, at least for DirectX12, where you have a beautiful game and you don't need that much hardware for it. It would be nice knowing beforehand that you don't need to upgrade your graphics setup or whatever else. But then this s*** happens, and it's just like... Anyways, similar to what happened with Star Wars Battlefront, the Frostbite 3 engine delivers impressive, immersive visuals without really pushing your hardware, as I just mentioned. All you really need is any modern mid-range graphics card and a CPU that has a few cores and you'll be fine. Battlefield will play the way it was meant to be. No SLI, overclocking, or bayonets required. Just hopefully you're even allowed to play. So... we'll see. I'm gonna go be salty somewhere else, and we'll just do the ad spot and move on. Crunchyroll is a site created by anime fans for anime fans that offers the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan, like Re Zero or Orange. And they have a large collection of the most popular anime series, like Naruto and Ace Attorney. All of the content on their site is professionally subtitled, so head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Crunchyroll Premium. If you enjoy the many benefits of Premium, like 1080p streaming, getting new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and having the ability to stream anywhere, anytime on a variety of devices like phones, tablets, game consoles, PCs, whatever, you can continue your Premium membership to Crunchyroll for only $6.95 per month. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and check them out. Alright guys, if you liked that video, hit the like button, get subscribed, and comment down below about how much you hate DRM. If you disliked that video, feel free to go ahead and hit the dislike button. If you want to buy something, like Battlefield 1, you can check it out in the Amazon link in the description down below. You can also see shirts down there and some other cool stuff. If you want to talk on the forum about how DRM is annoying as all freaking heck, you can do that. That link is also in the description down below. And watch this video, which is our GTA V comprehensive performance breakdown.