NVIDIA GeForce RTX Ray Tracing In Battlefield V Explored Pre And Post Patch
The much anticipated, and sometimes controversial, next installment in the Battlefield franchise is here. There are many aspects to the game, like the World War II setting for example, which have gamers questioning whether or not we need yet another FPS set in the same era in history, especially in light of last year's Call of Duty WWII. The thing that has had most of us tech enthusiasts waiting with baited breath, however, is the chance to finally see NVIDIA's GeForce RTX real-time Ray Tracing effects live, in an actual game. Battlefield is indeed the first publicly available game to use these new DXR/RTX effects and it's exciting to finally see new technology employed, beyond the standard rasterized graphics we've been used to all these years.
A launch-day patch and game ready driver for the game enabled NVIDIA's RTX technology. However, when RTX series cards were first launched and real-time Ray Tracing was initially introduced back in August, NVIDIA's chosen title to show off RTX technology during the announcement was Battlefield V, so technically RTX has been implemented for months.
In any event, to supplement this written evaluation of NVIDIA RTX and Battlefield V performance, we've also prepared a detailed demo video, walking through the image quality output as well as performance levels at various settings, with GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 cards. Strap in for a bit here and then we'll comb through the details even more on the pages ahead...
See NVIDIA RTX In Action In BFV In Our Deep Dive Demo Here
Regardless, the delay between NVIDIA's announcement to public availability of actual games using the technology caused a bit of an uproar as well. Many folks found it hard to accept a new product based solely on the promise of new technology, which may or may not eventually be adopted by game developers.
The eventual public release of Battlefield V and the first independent testing of RTX tech triggered even more criticism, because of the significant performance impact enabling ray tracing had on the in-game action.
Fast forward a few weeks and we had been working feverishly to get some footage and performance comparisons of the actual RTX implementation. Right as we were about to release our performance article though, NVIDIA/DICE announced the Tides of War update, which improves performance with RTX enabled. So, with that we went back to the test bench and started over. Here today, we will be testing all that RTX has to offer as of this particular moment in BFV. We are going to call this implementation RTX B2 on the pages ahead. The reason we call it RTX B2 is that NVIDIA and DICE have already said that even though performance is markedly improved over the day one implementation, they are still working on optimizing it further, so the implementation and performance you see here isn't final.
Follow along as we will take you through our first experiences with RTX on each of the three GeForce RTX cards currently available. We will show you the visual details that are enhanced by RTX, such as lighting and reflections. And with the new update now available, we can also show you day one Battlefield V performance versus the patched performance with the new Tides of War update. Onward then...
