Battlefield V Ray Tracing
NVIDIA OFFICIALLY STARTED selling its new RTX 2080 Ti on September 20, 2018. Prior to the launch, we were given a short hands-on demonstration of ray tracing in a couple of games: BattlefieldV and ShadowoftheTomb Raider. But both games ended up releasing without any form of ray tracing, with a promise that a future patch would add the feature. We still don’t have a TombRaider patch, but BattlefieldV made good on its promise, with a DXR support arriving just a week after the early access began. That’s the good news. The bad news: It’s really demanding. We shouldn’t be surprised, and it’s not as bad as some suspected after the initial demos in August. There were rumors flying about that the game only ran at 30fps at 1080p with ray tracing, and that was on an RTX 2080 Ti. Reality is much better, with 60fps or more, even at 1440p on an RTX 2080—at least in some areas. More complex scenes can drop quite a bit from that mark.
As an example, an RTX 2080 Ti runs the snowy Nordlys single-player campaign at 92/70/41fps at 1080p/1440p/4K using the Ultra preset. Turn DXR off, and performance improves to 144/128/78fps. The RTX 2080 goes from 139/105/61 without DXR to 78/58/29fps with ray tracing, and the RTX 2070 drops from 121/90/52 to 65/47/25fps. Those are steep declines. Even worse, they appear to be more of a best-case result.
On another level, Tirailleur, running without DXR gives slightly better performance than the Nordlys level I tested, but with DXR on, frame rates drop by 60 percent. That equates to 75/57/33fps on the 2080 Ti, 63/47/24 on the RTX 2080, and 50/38/20fps on the 2070. If that’s not bad enough, performance in some of the multiplayer testing appears even worse, though the frequent complete stalls make me think there’s still plenty of debugging left to do.
Frankly, BattlefieldV is a poor initial showcase of ray-tracing tech. For one, DXR is only used for reflections—global illumination, ambient occlusion, and other effects still rely on the rasterization hardware. And while DXR raytraced reflects look better than screen space reflections—which can only simulate reflections with data that’s visible on the screen—it’s not enough of a graphical upgrade to warrant the 40– 60 percent drop in performance. It’s also a fastpaced multiplayer game, so players are less likely to want to sacrifice frame rates in pursuit of higher image quality.
There’s hope that things will get better, as DICE has stated that the current implementation of DXR is more of a first go, and it wastes a lot of computational effort casting rays that end up not being useful. You can also turn down the DXR level to reduce the performance hit—but, of course, that also reduces the visual impact.
This is still very early days for ray tracing, and I remain optimistic that other games will put the RTX hardware to better use. Metro
Exodus and Shadowof theTomb Raider are both primarily singleplayer, and they use DXR for more than just reflections. And to be fair, getting even one major game that uses completely new graphics technology within two months of availability is impressive.
My real concern is that this first round of RTX hardware is merely a stepping stone. It’s a foot in the door for ray-tracing hardware, and it paves the way for faster and better implementations. The future RTX 30 and 40 series (or whatever they’re called) are when ray tracing will hopefully go mainstream, and by then, today’s $1,200 2080 Ti may perform more like a $200 piece of hardware.