With the launch of Battlefield 6 Open Beta yesterday, I was eager to give EA’s latest creation a try, especially as the previous franchise entry left a lot to be desired. The experience was quite smooth, if not for an unexpectedly heavy CPU demand. It seems that my trusty Ryzen 5 7600X isn’t fast enough to extract the maximum performance out of my Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card. Let me explain why.
Logically, when I saw my frame rate hover around 65fps when run at the QHD resolution allied to the ultra-quality preset, I went straight to the graphics settings and enabled FSR Quality. To my surprise, it didn’t change performance all that much. In fact, it served to make the game look less sharp. Seeing this, I then enabled the in-game performance counter, which indicated that my CPU was only capable of pushing 65fps, even though the GPU had a lot more headroom left.
Since my default position is to configure the CPU in 65W Eco mode to save power, reverting to its regular 105W state should give it more power to boost higher and improve performance, right? While it’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons in a highly dynamic multiplayer game, I tried as much as possible to do similar runs by selecting the same maps in each game mode. The results are clear, dear reader, as the Ryzen 5 7600X is the bottleneck.
For your delectation, I made a bunch of measurements to show you how the performance changed when I moved from Eco mode to Normal. Starting with the low-player-count King of the Hill game mode, the average fps improved by 13.5%, moving from 73fps to 82.9fps. The larger Conquest mode saw an even higher boost of 16.8%, jumping from 70.7fps to 82.6fps. Lastly, my favourite mode so far, Breakthrough, gained the most at 17.9%, raising from 65.9fps to 77.7fps. Not bad for a single option change.
Further percentile measurements – ranging from 0.1% to 95%, as shown on the y-axis – bear out the same truth. A meatier, faster CPU helps raise all metrics.
However, what makes the Ryzen 5 7600X bottleneck crystal clear is a change in the graphics setting. While you would expect a reasonable fps boost when dropping to lower graphics presets, the needle barely budged in my case. Switching from ultra graphics to medium nets a 4.6% improvement, moving from 77.7fps to 81.3fps. Feeding the CPU more power provides significantly higher gains, cementing the theory of CPU bottlenecking.
I also made a couple of frame-time graphs that show how the GPU isn’t fully utilised. In the first, below, you can see that the GPU load hovers around 90%, while the second shows it sitting below 80%. But most importantly, notice how the GPU load drops when the CPU load spikes, and how the GPU load increases when the CPU load drops. In other words, in scenes where the CPU isn’t fully used by running simulations and other tasks, its extra headroom is used to create more graphics calls for the GPU, loading the GPU properly and boosting performance accordingly.
Note that the Ryzen 5 7600X’s 60% utilisation report is completely normal, as the game doesn’t leverage the CPU at all times and at maximum capacity. That said, this may improve with future updates, but for now, this is how things are.
All of this indicates that after three years of loyal and efficient service, my Ryzen 5 7600X is no longer powerful enough to extract the maximum performance from demanding new games. At least not when limited to 65W. Now, I will have to consider overclocking it, to make it last for a couple more years, until Zen 7 or the equivalent from Intel releases.
Performance aside, I am happy to report that for a beta state, the game is very stable, free of bugs. Mind you, I didn’t play for hours on end, but things seem promising for the final release planned for October 10, 2025. Fingers crossed the fun won’t be ruined by micro-transactions and cheaters. Until then, I’m on the lookout for a good deal on a higher-end chip.
