When DICE and EA revealed Star Wars: Battlefront, the first thing we told ourselves was that the final version would never come close to the visuals that were showcased. See, Star Wars: Battlefront looked incredible and it was really hard to believe that DICE would pull it off. Well, today we are happy to report that we were wrong. Star Wars: Battlefront is a phenomenally optimized game, looks just as good as its reveal trailer, and could very well be the most optimized game of 2015.

As always, we used an Intel i7 4930K (turbo boosted at 4.0Ghz) with 8GB RAM, NVIDIA’s GTX690, Windows 8.1 64-bit and the latest WHQL version of the GeForce drivers. NVIDIA has already included an SLI profile for this title that offers amazing SLI scaling, meaning that you will not have to mess around with third-party tools – such as NVIDIA Inspector Tool – in order to enable it.

In order to find out how the game performs on modern-day dual-cores, we simulated one. And to our surprise, a dual-core system (with Hyper Threading enabled) can maintain above 60fps at all times, even on 40-person servers. This is pretty amazing considering the chaos that occurs in such matches. As said, DICE did an incredible work.

Furthermore, the game scales incredibly well on more than four CPU cores. As we can see above, all of our six CPU cores were used. The performance difference between a dual-core and a hexa-core is noteworthy (around 20fps-40fps), however the good news is that the game is fully playable and enjoyable even on dual-core CPUs.

As a result of the amazing CPU scaling, Star Wars: Battlefront can be considered a GPU bound title. In Single GPU mode, our GTX690 ran the game with 40fps-50fps at 1080p with Ultra settings. With SLI enabled, our GTX690 was delivering an amazing experience. SLI scaling is brilliant in this title and the game never dropped below 70fps, no matter what was happening on screen.

Not only does Star Wars: Battlefront run amazingly well on the PC platform, it also looks ridiculously beautiful. Star Wars: Battlefront features the best environments we’ve seen this far in a first-person game, topping even those powered by CRYENGINE. Thanks to Photogrammetry and Physically Based Rendering, the game sports visuals that are simply too good to be true. And that’s because Star Wars: Battlefront looks amazing and does not require a top of the line PC as other triple-A titles do (without even coming close to this game’s visuals). We’ve seen Photogrammetry in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter too, but Star Wars: Battlefront takes that tech one step further. The game sports incredibly detailed textures that fit in just 2GB of VRAM. Ubisoft and Rocksteady, take notes!

As always, there are some small gripes with the game’s visuals, but we’re simply nitpicking here. For example, there is noticeable pop-in even with Ultra settings. Furthermore, while most characters are highly detailed and better than those featured in pretty much all other games, they are not as lifelike as those of Black Ops III (or at least in our opinion). Yes, we’re comparing different models here, however Black Ops III did feature some of the best human characters we’ve ever seen.

All in all, Star Wars: Battlefront is one of the most optimized games of 2015. The game comes with a Field of View slider, a respectable amount of options to tweak, is not plagued by mouse acceleration/smoothing issues, and has a rock solid netcode. We did not experience any lag or any connectivity issues at all during our tests, so kudos to DICE for offering a better MP experience than BF4 on launch day.

Enjoy!