From a gameplay performance perspective, the AMD Radeon HD 290X came out on the top of the heap, finding itself playable at 2560x1600 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and 2X MSAA enabled. The GeForce GTX TITAN followed by being playable at the same settings, however, it produced an average frame rate about 10FPS below that of the R9 290X.
Taking a step down from the top two performers, the AMD Radeon R9 290, AMD Radeon R9 280X and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 were all playable at 2560x1600 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and low FXAA enabled. The GeForce GTX 770 was able to play at 1920x1080 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and 2X MSAA enabled.
Rounding out the lineup, both the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 and the AMD Radeon R9 270X was capable of playing at 1920x1080 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and low FXAA enabled.
From an overall gameplay perspective, it seems that the Frostbite 3 engine has gone a long way to prevent significant sudden frame rate dips from impacting the gaming experience. Playing Battlefield 3, these frame rate dips (for example, when taking out a tank) could easily render your ability to escape from the situation futile. With Battlefield 4, these dips do not feel like these bring action to a halt.
What was more disconcerting was the inconsistent performance between AMD and NVIDIA cards. Overall, AMD cards tended to perform better than the NVIDIA counterpart at the particular price point, with the exception of the GeForce GTX 760 vs. the Radeon R9 270X.
With each NVIDIA card, we observed frame rates to be far more varied than AMD based cards over the course of playing the game with them. It almost seems that the performance concerns that we had with NVIDIA cards during our Beta evaluation have only been partially fixed at this point.
