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BC2 Bullet drop comparison

About a week ago someone made a video for Bad Company 2 showing a sniping comparison between the use of normal bullets versus the “Magnum” ammunition upgrade. Interestingly, they thought it showed no difference, while I came away with the opposite impression. This post is a horribly nit-picky comparison of shots in the video.

Non-magnum shot

Non-magnum hit

Magnum shot

Magnum hit

First I needed to account for the slight differences in player aim. To do this, I compared each shot and the corresponding hit in an image editor, using the “difference” blending mode. This mode brightens areas where two layers are different. I then manually aligned them so that details such as the sign, rock, and sandbags were as close as possible. Then I painted a small red dot on the “hit” image which corresponded to where the crosshair was when the shot was made. Here’s an example with the non-magnum run:

The non-magnum shot alignment

This process yielded two “hit” pictures which show where the shooter was originally aiming.

Non-magnum hit with aim indicator

Magnum hit with aim indicator

Finally, we align both of these images so that the aim-points (red dots) are identical, and compare where the little puff-clouds kicked up from the shots are. The dark cloud is from the non-magnum shot, and appears to be slightly lower than the lighter cloud from the magnum-shot.

Aligned comparison between the two shots

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