Battlefield has been one of the biggest gaming franchises of the decade with numerous sequels and incarnations of the game, most recently on the consoles with Bad Company. The latest version for PC Gamers is Battlefield Heroes which is a new take on the game franchise which brings it into the world of web gaming and also simplifies the gameplay significantly to try and cater to casual gamers. The game is currently still in beta testing phase but we were able to get hold of a key and we decided to test the game to see how exactly it performs.

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Ultimate with ATI Catalyst 8.6 drivers and Forceware 177.41.

FRAPS was used for testing and unfortunately on the Village map in the game. Benchmarking FRAPS isn't the most accurate all the time but a multi-player game adds in added variations. We tried to re-produce the same exact results though despite these results we feel are very accurate but take them with somewhat a grain of salt that FRAPS adds.

The game is very limited in graphics options from "High", "Medium", and "Low" being the only options with no details or advanced section. The gameplay matches the engine in it's simplicity so that isn't a big deal, as you'll see the game runs well even on "High" even on older hardware.

We start things off at 1680x1050 and tested on value and older cards and as you can see they're all above 30fps even at "High" with the exception of the GeForce 6600 GT and Radeon 2600 XT video cards. The GeForce 7900 GTX hits almost 100fps, which is the limit for the game engine.

Bumping up the resolution to that of a 24" monitor we naturally lose performance on value cards but the 9500 GT excels in this game. A 7900 GT gets 50fps and a Radeon X1900 XT brings in 46 with settings maxed.

2560x1600 is the highest resolution supported by graphics cards and monitors today and luckily Battlefield Heroes supports it. The 7900 GTX which is now years old easily handles it coming in at 44.1fps and the 9600 GT brings in near 70.

Battlefield Heroes obviously should have few problems running on most computers. If you have an issue, it'll more than likely be a driver issue than a performance issue. We look forward to the full game being released and thank EA for our beta key. Read on for screenshots.