Battlefield V DXR Update Performance – RTX Just Got Exciting

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

Battlefield V is available now. You can play it on Origin for PC, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for around £49.99 for the standard edition. Keep in mind, Ray Tracing is only available on Nvidia RTX graphics cards at this time, and only on PC, not on the console releases of this game.

Overview

The technology going into DXR is certainly impressive. Again, I stress that Nvidia didn’t create it really, as it’s actually a feature set of the latest version of DirectX. However, the RTX graphics cards have the extra cores needed to process the new data and take advantage of it. From that point on, it’s up to developers to choose which DXR features to implement; shadows, lighting, reflections, texture streaming and more. DXR isn’t a one and done thing, there are many aspects of it that we are yet to see. Shadow of the Tomb Raider will use the shadow method, the new Metro will use it for lighting, and Battlefield V only uses it for reflections.

Meh to Wow in Two Weeks

I’ve been saying it since the start, things will get better, and they’ll get better fast. The internet was awash with hatred towards Nvidia. Misguided as much of that anger was, the reason for it was there for all to see. Turning DXR on cut frame rates in half, even on the £1300 RTX 2080 Ti. That’s a painful pill to swallow. However, to see performance improvements as significant as this in just two short weeks is truly remarkable. What can Nvidia, Dice, EA, and whoever else optimise further in the coming weeks, months, even years, remains to be seen? However, I am hopeful that there’s still plenty more performance to come. RTX started well with powerful rendering performance. Now with DXR picking up the pace, the true value of RTX cards is starting to shine through.

Re-Re-Re-Test

DXR, Ray Tracing, Shadows, whatever feature you want to call upon. These are the future of PC gaming and they’re not going anywhere, that you can count on. This isn’t like 3D glasses, this is the next logical step that GPU markers have been dreaming of for literally decades. Real-time Ray Tracing is huge. There will be updates, there will be patches, there will be problems. However, we’ll be here to re-test it alone the way. Will we see 60FPS 4K DXR from the 2080 Ti in Battlefield V soon enough? I think we just might.

4K Video Testing