Conclusion

As a single-player campaign, Battlefield V is a mostly fun joyride that's less headache-inducing than "Call of Duty" campaigns from the past. At least, Battlefield has some sort of single-player story-like experience, which Call of Duty ditched with their latest iteration. Each War Story is well differentiated from the other, which breaks much of the monotony associated with an eight to ten level-long single-mission campaign. You will walk away feeling a sense of deja vu from the Battlefield 1 campaign, though. At its GeForce RTX series unveil, NVIDIA used Battlefield V as one of its tech-demonstrators, hyping it up as one of this year's most advanced titles for the PC. It's also reportedly one of the reasons EA delayed the Battlefield V launch to accommodate NVIDIA's RTX real-time ray-tracing technology. Unfortunately, that is a damp squib.

At launch, Battlefield V will not be shipping with RTX. This is partly also because of Microsoft withdrawing its Windows 10 October 2018 Update (which includes DirectX Ray Tracing), which means a lot fewer games than expected actually meet the software requirements for RTX, let alone hardware. Also, NVIDIA's ambitious DLSS (deep-learning super-sampling) AA is absent at launch. While RTX is confirmed to be coming in a future patch (at an unknown date), it looks like DLSS will not make it to Battlefield as we haven't heard any indications of that.

Battlefield V campaign arenas and multiplayer maps are set in beautiful locales that are rendered to perfection by Frostbite 3 in DirectX 12 mode, although visually, it doesn't come across as a splendor compared to Battlefield 1. While polygon counts seem identical to Battlefield 1, the visual fidelity from the environment has definitely been dialed up. We're not sure by how much RTX will improve the photo-realism. It's already one of the prettiest games out there.

The game has the usual amount of graphics settings. No doubt, EA learned a lot from previous Battlefield games. It's great to see support for HDR and ultra-wide monitors. You may run the game in either DirectX 11 or DirectX 12, with DX12 showing a little bit more stuttering in general—Battlefield 1 was and still is the same; looks like EA is having difficulties getting this fixed. The only gripe with settings that I have is that the game lacks an option to turn off temporal anti-aliasing. While TAA does look nice, it blurs out the image slightly, which is a big no-no for competitive multi-player shooters where you need to shoot at your enemies with pixel precision.

We obtained a fascinating mix of results in our performance testing. You'll notice we have a lot fewer graphics cards tested than usual, which is because we ran out of activations for our Origin Access accounts to play the game before launch. Battlefield V's DRM won't allow more than five hardware changes per 24 hours, which includes switching the graphics card. We will add more graphics cards and suitably revise our conclusion within the next 24 hours.

Let's begin with the sub-$300 class. We see the GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB badly lose to the similarly priced Radeon RX 570 4 GB. At highest settings (which we used), Battlefield V is able to utilize a lot more video memory than what the GTX 1060 3 GB can provide, and it's funny how much of a difference an extra 1 GB of memory can make. If you already game on a GTX 1060 3 GB, don't worry as dialing down some settings, such as texture resolution, will improve performance. The GTX 1060 6 GB is significantly faster than the RX 570 4 GB and locks horns with its arch-rival, the RX 580 8 GB. The RX 580 stays marginally ahead in 1080p and 1440p (the only resolutions relevant for this class of cards).

Moving a segment up, we find the Radeon RX Vega 64 to perform surprisingly better than expected, ending up just 5% slower than NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 2070. To put it differently, the RTX 2070 ends up performing a lot worse than expected given the previous-generation GTX 1080 Ti stays significantly ahead of it in all resolutions. We don't believe this to be due to its 11 GB video memory because even at the highest resolution, the game barely uses 7 GB. Any cards from this segment should let you comfortably play at 1440p.

Move up to 4K UHD and you'll realize that you need at least an RX Vega 64 to manage frame rates above 50 FPS. The GeForce RTX series certainly helps here as all three cards keep frame rates above 50, and the RTX 2080 will let you comfortably game at 60 Hz. The RTX 2080 Ti, while much faster, isn't fast enough for 120 Hz since it hovers at around 85 FPS. The GTX 1080 Ti is within striking distance behind the RTX 2080. If you still haven't decided where to spend $700, the scales should still tip in favor of the RTX 2080, not just because of future-proofing and upcoming RTX support, but also generally better performance given the GTX 1080 Ti is getting pricey.

Overall, we've had a lot of fun testing and playing Battlefield V. It lives up to most of its gameplay hype even if it makes you feel shortchanged in the eye-candy front due to lack of RTX at launch. Should you buy the game for $60? Of course, or spend $15 on Origin Access and decide in the first month if you liked the game.