Conclusion

Benchmarking Battlefield 2042 Open Beta was not easy. It is an always-online title—there won't be an offline mode, EA has confirmed this multiple times. On top of that, the game uses Denuvo, which limits hardware changes to five activations per day. I really wonder why EA bothered with Denuvo here, which has a reputation for causing performance issues when not implemented correctly. Given DICE's track-record, I'm quite confident that they know how to use Denuvo properly, though. The dynamic multi-player nature of the game makes benchmark runs difficult, some small variances are expected, but I think I managed to get solid results.

In terms of graphics, the latest version of DICE's Frostbite engine looks amazing. Fidelity has definitely improved over Battlefield V. As for the rendering API, the game uses DirectX 12 exclusively, as expected. I'm happy to report that the stuttering that plagued DirectX 12 in BF5 has been fixed, though there is sometimes another kind of stuttering in the beta that doesn't seem to be rendering related. I suspect netcode or debug logging (which is the point of the beta).

Another field of improvement is the physics engine, which feels more accurate and realistic now, very useful when destroying things. A lot of things in the world can be blown up. DICE is making great progress here, and it improves immersion. The Open Beta only has a single map, which is huge, almost too big, even with 128 players. I sometimes felt like their highest priority was to make the map look spectacular, so you can see lots of the action on the battlefield, including people running around and shooting each other.

Rendering performance is demanding, but not totally unreasonable considering the graphics delivered. For 1080p 60 FPS, you'll need an RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600 XT, 1440p at 60 FPS is achievable with the RTX 3060 Ti and RX 6700 XT, and 4K60 is in reach for the RTX 3080, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT. At lower resolutions, AMD has the upper hand, while at higher resolutions, NVIDIA is in the lead. Once my Denuvo activations have reset, I'll benchmark some older graphics cards and update the charts in this review.

VRAM usage is fine. At 1080p, around 6 GB will be enough, but for 4K, you had better have 8 GB—these numbers are hardly a problem with modern graphics cards. This is a surprising difference to Far Cry 6, which requires over 10 GB at 4K with RT enabled, so the RTX 3080 ends up with stuttering, which is not a problem in Battlefield 2042. Only the 8 GB RX 6600 XT falls behind at 4K, possibly because of its PCIe x8 4.0 interface.

Only AMD is offering Game Ready drivers for Battlefield 2042 at this time. I'm sure NVIDIA will release an update soon, definitely in time for launch. We used the latest drivers from both companies. Considering how important the Battlefield series is, I have no doubt that driver engineers at both AMD and NVIDIA are hard at work trying to optimize every bit of their driver for the upcoming title. While testing, the NVIDIA driver crashed several times, especially when using Alt+Tab. Battlefield itself ran surprisingly stable for a beta, no crashes to report here. The Battlefield devs posted on Twitter that the Open Beta build is a months old version, which to me sounds like an excuse in case of issues, "but hey it's an old build, the final will be much better, you should preorder now, so you can be sure to get the game, just in case supplies run out."

I don't think it's worth commenting much on gameplay or balancing at this time, as all this can change before the final release. If you are still curious, head over to the EA forums or Reddit to get an idea of how people like the Beta so far.