Get your PC ready for the Star Wars Battlefront beta

EA and DICE have finally unleashed the open beta of Star Wars Battlefront, with the new first-person shooter floating out to gamers around the world. There's a few things you should know about it, like updating your PC to get it into better order for the game, as well as updating your GPU drivers for additional performance.

First off, we're going to presume that you have the Star Wars Battlefront beta installed on your PC. If not, open up Origin and download it now. The Star Wars Battlefront beta is just over 10GB in size.

After it's downloaded, make sure your PC has all of the latest Windows updates. If you're up to date, the next step is video drivers. Both AMD and NVIDIA have new Star Wars Battlefront beta ready drivers, with NVIDIA out in front with the latest drivers. We have links for them below.

NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 358.50 WHQL drivers

AMD Catalyst 15.9.1 Beta drivers

Once you have downloaded the drivers, we would suggest removing them completely with a different piece of software; Display Driver Uninstaller. This software will let you boot into Safe Mode, where you can select to remove the driver and reboot. Once you've done that, install the new driver that you downloaded.

After your video card drivers have been updated, you'll be nice and fresh and updated for the Star Wars Battlefront beta! Now jump in and kill some rebel scum. But first, we'll show you the Menu system for the game, as well as a quick couple of screenshots before we jump into the game ourselves.

First up, we have the main menu. Because this is just the beta, we can't access everything - but you can play around in the 6- to 40-player multiplayer side of things. Up the top, we have the 'Settings' menu where we can adjust audio, visual settings, controls, and more.

This is the Settings menu, where we can play around with the controls, gameplay options (HUD, etc), video settings, audio settings and your EA Account.

The video settings in Star Wars Battlefront are pretty much identical to Battlefield 4. We have the ability to switch monitors, adjust the resolution and refresh rate as well as the field of view all the way up to 110 degrees.

The visual settings allow for full adjustment, where you can run the Low/Medium/High/Ultra presets, or you can run your own custom preset. For our testing, we've run the Custom preset and just disabled AA - other than that, we're running Ultra presets for our benchmarking (another article to follow this).

The audio menu is decent, where you can switch between 2.1-channel and 5.1- or 7.1-channel surround sound. You can also choose the dynamic range of your audio, from wide all the way through to medium, narrow and headphones.

The gameplay section of the Star Wars Battlefront menu lets you play through camera options, and you have a full customized HUD to configure to your liking.

The controls sections lets you invert your controls (yes, I play with inverted mouse!).

Now, I'm going to go play the game and benchmark it with a bunch of cards at 1080p, 1440p, 4K, 3440x1440 and 11,520 x 2160. Expect a couple of performance articles looking at the Star Wars Battlefront beta over the weekend!

Last updated: Nov 3, 2020 at 07:12 pm CST