Conclusion

The first attempt at DXR on Battlefield V ended in a colossal disaster, which even had some of our readers write off the technology completely. One of the comments that really stuck out read "goodbye ray-tracing, see you in a decade." Much of that public hate was justified at the time because everybody expected the performance impact of RTX to be around 20% at most, while producing eye candy that justifies the performance hit and 20–30 % generational price-hikes for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series over the predecessor. It particularly pinched those who shelled out upward of $600 on graphics hardware only to find that the game was barely playable at 1080p with DXR enabled.

We are happy to report that the barrels of midnight oil burned in Stockholm and Santa Clara have paid off to produce significant performance improvements. The "Ultra" and "High" DXR reflections quality settings now yield performance numbers matching the "Low" setting from the older version of Battlefield V. In fact, at 4K UHD, the two are marginally better. The "Medium" and "Low" settings come with progressively higher performance than "Ultra" and "High". DICE also fixed the bug which caused the "Medium" setting to never get applied, and the performance difference between settings is generally bigger, which gives you better control over performance vs. fidelity.

Coming down to the numbers, at the lowest setting for the RTX 2080 Ti, there is still a 38% performance penalty at 1080p, which narrows down to 30% at 4K UHD. This means that 30% is the bare minimum performance cost of DXR at this time. The RTX 2080 Ti can now cope with all resolutions, including 4K UHD, where it manages upward of 47 FPS even at the "Ultra" setting. Easing up to "Medium" and "Low" pushes it close to the psychologically pleasing 60 FPS mark.

For the RTX 2080, this patch comes as a godsend as 4K UHD is finally playable again provided you set quality to "Medium" or "Low" to keep frame rates above 45 FPS because at "High" and "Ultra," it drops to below 40. 1440p and 1080p are now extremely smooth on the RTX 2080 at all quality levels, and frame rates are stable above 70 FPS.

The popular RTX 2070 finally handles 1440p smoothly at all levels and not just the 1080p resolution. For 1080p, frame rates stay above 68 FPS at all quality settings. At 1440p, frame rates range from 54 to 62 FPS depending on the quality level, which is still quite comfortable. 4K UHD is a tough ask. At "Medium" and "Low" settings, the RTX 2070 manages 35–40 FPS, which may be fine for single player, but may seem uncomfortable for competitive multiplayer. The "Ultra" and "High" settings are barely playable.

Numbers apart, in our subjective analysis of image quality, which you can take a look at on page 2, we find that visually, there's very little to tell the four grades apart. "Ultra," "High," and "Medium" are very hard to distinguish from each other in most cases. It's only with the "Low" setting that you begin to see slight image quality reduction with the reflections, and even so, only when you look very closely at things, such as reflections of yourself standing point-blank in front of a piece of reflective glass or something. Considering the fast-paced action of Battlefield V, it's highly unlikely that you'll ever notice a difference between "DXR Ultra" and "DXR Low" in regular gameplay. The difference between "DXR off" and "DXR on" is easily noticeable, however.

We couldn't spot any visual downgrades between RTX in the previous version and today's update. Rather, it seems DICE and NVIDIA worked on doing things "smarter", which is always the better alternative to solving a problem than "throwing more hardware at it". We were also pleasantly surprised that any crashes when using RTX are now completely eliminated.

The "Ultra" toggle offers very little by the way of image quality to justify its performance cost over "Medium," and in most cases even "Low". We recommend setting RTX to "low" to enable the ray-traced reflections experience that's enough to go "wow," if not "omg!", while keeping the performance hit low enough for solid gameplay. The day NVIDIA and its developer partners manage to bring the performance cost of DXR to below 20% is when RTX will have truly arrived to the scene. NVIDIA tells us that they are still working on improving DXR performance, so we might see higher FPS in the near future.