so I found the system requirements for Battlefield 3. It needs quite a system to run luckily most people have quad cores these days. The following link is from Nvidia and it will run a system analyzer to see if your gpu is up to the task of running it on high.
http://www.geforce.com/GamesandApps/games/battlefield-3/GPUAnalyzer
Minimum System Requirements
- OS: Windows Vista (SP2) 32-bit
- Processor: 2 GHz Dual Core (Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or Athlon X2 2.7 GHz)
- Memory: 2 GB
- Hard Drive: 20 GB
- Graphics Card (NVIDIA): DirectX 10.0 Compatible with 512 MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 8, 9, 200, 300, 400 or 500 series with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or higher performance)
- Graphics Card (ATI): DirectX 10.0 Compatible with 512 MB RAM (ATI Radeon 3000, 4000, 5000 or 6000 series with ATI Radeon 3870 or higher performance)
- Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
- Keyboard and Mouse
- DVD ROM Drive
- OS: Windows 7 64-bit
- Processor: Quad-core CPU
- Memory: 4 GB
- Hard Drive: 20 GB
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 or ATI Radeon 6950
- Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
- Keyboard and Mouse
- DVD ROM Drive
... 
