Performance boost help

Graphics card isn't very important, its all about how good your cpu is and how many cores it is running on.

I know it sounds cocky of me to say this but honestly would it hurt to upgrade your graphics card? I mean for maybe about 100$ you could get a decent Radeon HD or the GTX 550 ( assuming you purchase from amazon ). if not the GTX 550 could run you about 149$

Battlefield 3 runs 4 cores, and the i3 runs 2 cores assuming he has earlier version of this product. so yes his cpu is outdated too however if he did overclock then he could reach the 4 core requirement easily, but not many people know how to overclock or keep their computer cool enough to handle overclocking options.

I have AMD FX-9590 black edition which costs about 699$ which is great because it's unlocked and I can tweak it however I want and it's an eight-core which is overkill for bf3 this CPU should have no problems on bf4 as well.

but if you're on a budget build and don't care too much for the graphics and don't mind playing on medium settings you could get the AMD FX-6300 or get CPU's that come with integrated graphics if you can't afford both a CPU + GPU