A new update for Battlefield V and a driver release from Nvidia could make ray tracing in the World War II shooter far more viable for those running Nvidia’s new RTX Turing graphics cards. Developers pledge as much as a 50-percent improvement in overall performance when ray tracing is enabled as a result of optimizations and bug fixes. That should make it possible, we’re told, to hit a consistent 60 FPS at 1440P with ray tracing at its most realistic level.
The ray tracing performance in Dice’s Battlefield V left us rather underwhelmed when we first tested it. It was and is definitely pretty to look at, but it doesn’t have a dramatic effect on gameplay and the performance hit that comes with it is far from worth it. Fortunately, it appears that a big component of why it was such a drain on system resources, with even the most powerful of hardware at its disposal, was because it needed better optimization. With that now in place, we may have to retest the experience to see how much it has improved.
By the numbers pushed front and center by Dice and Nvidia, the improvement could be dramatic. Citing performance gains as much as 50 percent in some scenarios, Dice analyzed the way that rays are drawn in various scenes and made adjustments to make them focus on reflective surfaces specifically, adding more to those areas and less to those with very little or no reflective properties. This reduces the overall number of rays drawn, leading to much less of a performance overhead. It also fixed a couple of bugs related to ray tracing and adjusted the way reflections work on destructible environment elements, among other fixes.
All of these improvements will be released as part of the Tides of War Chapter 1: Overture update for Battlefield V. That update was supposed to be released by now, but Dice announced that extra testing was needed and therefore it had delayed the roll out ever so slightly.
Nvidia has made some optimizations of its own, which aren’t quite as detailed, but they come as part of the new Game Ready 417.22 driver, which also optimizes Nvidia graphics cards for Just Cause 4 and World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth.
Overall, Nvidia and Dice claim that with the new patch in place, RTX Turing GPUs should be capable of delivering the following:
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti: 60+ FPS at 1440p resolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Ultra quality.
- GeForce RTX 2080: 60+ FPS at 1440p resolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Medium quality.
- GeForce RTX 2070: 60+ FPS at 1080p resolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Medium quality.
