Classic FPS Remastered: Battlefield Bad Company 2 (Patreon)

It's time to go waaaaay back into the past, to revisit archive assets from our Big Box of Hard Drives,  to decompress a series of 2010 RAR files and to see what treasures lurk therein. I was looking forward to this one - Battlefield Bad Company 2 is widely considered to be one of the most impressive Frostbite-based games of the PS360 era. What we got here was a brilliant single-player campaign plus an excellent multiplayer mode with a destruction model that actually seemed considerably more comprehensive than what we saw in Battlefield 3.

What we also got was an often eye-rending screen-tearing effect and next to no anti-aliasing! These days developers tend to run with triple buffering, thus eliminating tearing altogether. Or else, a more adaptive approach to tearing is deployed, where the tearline appears only at the top of the screen where it is less impactful to image quality. Why have tearing at all? Well, what's happening is that a frame is completed beyond its render budget (in this case, 33ms). Rather than wait until the next screen refresh, the new frame is deployed during scan-out, as the display updates. It gets new visual information to you as soon as possible but it also means that two frames can coexist in the same refresh. 

As always, the video is available on YouTube in a nearest neighbour-scaled 2160p. Essentially every 720p pixel is a 3x3 pixel block with no interpolation when viewed at 4K. The idea is to retain the original pixel structure and how it looks when blown up on a modern display. However, as always the digitalfoundry.net downloads are available for your archives in both formats. You can grab those right here: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2021-05-02-battlefield-bad-company-2-classic-fps-remastered