BFV AND NVIDIA’S NEW RAY TRACING TECH

I’ve spent a good chunk of yesterday and today trying to get a handle on what ray tracing does—and more importantly doesn’t do—in Battlefield 5. As the first publicly available test case, there’s a lot riding on game, and let’s be frank: it’s not the end-all, be-all of graphics and gaming excellence right now. In fact, the only thing ray tracing is used for in Battlefield 5 is improved reflections. They look good, better than the non-DXR mode certainly, and it’s pretty cool to see mirrors, windows, and vehicle surfaces more accurately reflecting their surroundings. But this particular implementation isn’t going to revolutionise the gaming industry.

I’ll start with the multiplayer, just to get that out of the way. In its present state, with Dice already pointing out some bugs and known issues and talking about future patches, it’s far too early to make a final evaluation. But things are seriously messy. On an RTX 2070 at 1080p ultra, sometimes performance was okay, hovering around 40-50 fps, but I got a lot of framerate drops, often hitching for up to half a second or more, and 97 percentile minimums were 7 fps! That’s not even remotely playable if you’re trying to be competitive, though this is a bug to fix rather than something that’s inherently part of the ray tracing hardware. Sometimes I’d go 10-15 seconds without any major stalls, other times it would happen every second or two.

Let’s move over to the singleplayer testing, which is where I see ray tracing being far more useful in the near term anyway. In multiplayer, especially a fast-paced shooter like Battlefield 5, I don’t think many competitive gamers will sacrifice a lot of performance for improved visuals. I might, but then I’m not a competitive multiplayer gamer. Singleplayer modes are a different matter, because the pace tends to be slower and a steady 60 fps or more is sufficient. I play most games at maximum quality, even 4k, simply because I have the hardware to do so and I want the games to look their best. Battlefield 5’s War Stories mode has some impressive graphics and often looks beautiful, and adding ray tracing for reflections improves the overall look.