Introduction

Hello yet again! If you're having a sense of deja vu for the second time, it's because we've already published an article titled "Battlefield V Performance Analysis" last month when Battlefield V was first released. A bit later, game developer DICE retrofitted the game with real-time ray-tracing elements taking advantage of DirectX Raytracing, using NVIDIA RTX Technology, so we posted a follow-up article: RTX DXR Raytracing. The initial implementation of DXR was nothing short of a PR disaster not just for DICE, but also NVIDIA, which built its entire GeForce RTX 20-series product family out of a singular focus on real-time ray-tracing features because the cards aren't sufficiently faster than the GTX 10-series to otherwise warrant 20–30 % price increases.

You can learn all about RTX in our Turing Architecture and RTX Technology article.

NVIDIA has since been deeply involved with DICE in performance optimization of the "DXR reflections" settings in Battlefield V and promised users up to 50% frame-rate increments that make the game more playable at higher resolutions with DXR enabled. DICE was scheduled to update Battlefield V on the 5th of December with the "Tides of War: Chapter 1: Overture" update, which includes a new single-player war story called "The Last Tiger", probably making it the first single-player video game ever that depicts playing from the perspective of a Nazi officer, a new multiplayer map called "Panzerstorm," the much needed test-range for multiplayer gamers, company gear, and various in-game items, such as new/re-tuned weapons. Along with this update, DICE released the DXR reflections performance optimization it co-developed with NVIDIA.

Just like before, DICE's implementation of DXR is limited to realistic reflections; don't expect a fully ray-traced game. You can enable or disable DXR reflections and adjust the quality of DXR reflections. In this supplementary article, we are testing the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 with DXR enabled across the many DXR reflection-quality settings in three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p, and 4K Ultra HD. We will carry over our "RTX-off" data obtained on the older version of Battlefield V from the older article.

The new GeForce 417.22 WHQL drivers were released with code that makes these optimizations work. These drivers are mandatory for the latest Battlefield update, so we tested our GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 samples with these drivers.