According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.
We used the game's demanding ‘Ultra' setting to push today's gaming hardware. No one plays games anymore at 1024×768 with low image quality settings.
No problems with the ASRock 990FX Extreme9's graphics or PCI-E configurations; all three configurations output very similar frames per second in Battlefield 3.