Battlefield 3 Minimum Requirements for PC

The minimum and recommended requirements for the PC version of Battlefield 3 have been released. By the look of it you'll need to head towards the 64 bit version of the Windows 7 operating system. Disk space shouldn't be too much of a problem but you will want to get a decent video card.

As with most other FPS games, the frame rate and fluidity of gameplay is largely dominated by the amount of RAM, CPU speed and the type of graphics card. Video cards with embedded memory perform far better than ones which rely on the memory shared with the PC. Some video cards even have their own processors which help to offload work from the system CPU.

Examples of good video cards:

EVGA nVidia GeForce 9500GT 1 GB 2DVI PCI-Express Video Card
EVGA nVidia GeForce 9500GT 1 GB 2DVI PCI-Express Video Card
EVGA GeForce 8400 GS 512 MB DDR3 PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card
XFX ATI Radeon HD 5670 1 GB DDR5 DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort PCI-Express Video Card

You will need DirectX 10 or higher

Battlefield 3 will not work on Windows XP because of its dependency on the DirectX API version 10 or higher. These were only included with Windows Vista or higher. They use the Windows Display Driver Model that was only introduced with Windows Vista.

How to improve Battelfield 3 performance

RAM is relatively cheap these days so invest in as much RAM as you can. The video card that you choose will always make a big difference to gameplay. This is particularly true for 3D intensive games such as Battlefield 3. Nvidia have some of the best video cards available but always check the model of your PC before buying one.

Remember to close any other running programs whilst playing Battelfield 3. If you're confident that your PC is clean from infections and if you're not playing online then disconnect your wireless (or Ethernet) connection and switch off your antivirus software. This makes a big improvement because antivirus software is the biggest consumer of CPU cycles and RAM.

Minimum and recommend requirements to play Battlefield 3

Minimum

Hard Drive Space - 15 GB for disc version or 10 GB for digital version
Operating System - Windows Vista or Windows 7
Processor - Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz
RAM - 2GB
Video Card - DirectX 10 or 11 compatible Nvidia or AMD ATI card

Recommended

Hard Drive Space - 15 GB for disc version or 10 GB for digital version
Operating System - Windows 7 64-bit
Processor - Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
RAM - 4GB
Video Card - DirectX 11 Nvidia or AMD ATI card, GeForce GTX 460, Radeon Radeon HD 6850