This one will be short and sweet. The below is a chart I recorded while playing on an empty Battlefield 4 server of Siege of Shanghai. I walked around looking at various things trying to determine how much processing power was required.

The green line is the Frame Per Second (FPS) during the test. Higher is better. You want a higher frame per second score as this means the perception of motion to your eye is more believable.

The red bars are various events in the test. The first was when I was looking at a car on fire. The second was when I was looking at a building smoking after it had been on fire. The third was when the building was collapsing. The fourth is when I was staring at a wall, and fifth is when I was looking at car smoking after it had been on fire. The middle section is when I was shooting tank shells at the building. Each dip was a shot.

The blue line is the frame time during the test. I couldn’t get it lined up perfectly with the green, but it should match. That is, the spikes in the blue should line up to the dips in the green. Frame time is the amount of time the computer takes to generate a frame. You want this to be as low as possible it means the amount of frames you can generate in any given second will be higher. The frame time in the above chart spikes during demanding scenes and this directly causes a low FPS in the scene.

Here’s the fire scene:

Here’s the smoke:

Here’s the building collapsing: