Introduction

Battlefield 2042 is a multiplayer-focused first-person shooter that's set in the near-future, 21 years from now. Global warming has caused many countries to collapse, and these now stateless people have become mercenaries fighting on behalf of the US and Russia. While previous Battlefields have explored historic scenarios, you get modern equipment, deployable turrets, and drones this time around. As expected for Battlefield, there's various cars, tanks, helicopters and jets available as force-multipliers.



DICE has revamped the classes system. While there's still "assault," "engineer," "medic," and "recon," these work differently than before and are now called "specialists." Each specialist has unique traits, but every specialist can use all weapons; they have different gadgets to better fit specific situations on the battlefield, though.

The maps have gotten much bigger and support 128 players now, twice the previous maximum. Battlefield 2042 releases November 19th and will be available on Steam, Origin, and Epic Games Store. Crossplay with consoles will be supported, but you can turn it off if you want.

Battlefield 2042 is based on the latest version of the Frostbite engine and uses DirectX 12 exclusively. NVIDIA has confirmed that DLSS will be supported, but it's not available in the beta yet. It also seems that Battlefield will not support ray tracing at launch, but it'll probably be added at a later time.

In this article, we've benchmarked the Battlefield 2042 open beta on a selection of the latest graphics cards, at three resolutions, to get a feel for the hardware requirements.