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.

Screenshots

On this page, we compiled a handful of test scenes, one from each of the four "DXR reflections quality" settings (low/medium/high/ultra), with the Tides of War Chapter 1: Overture patch from the 5th of December, coupled with NVIDIA's 417.22 WHQL drivers. The Screenshots page of our original Battlefield V DXR review has additional images describing technical aspects of DICE's implementation of DXR for reflections. Each of the screenshots below was captured using a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card at 1080p and cropped to show the important parts only.

As a quick refresher of what each of the four grades of DXR reflections quality means, "Ultra" sets the maximum ray count to 40 percent of the number of screen pixels and applies ray tracing to materials with 0.5 smoothness or higher. "High" does the same, but reduces the maximum ray count to 31.5 percent of the number of screen pixels. "Medium" and "Low" apply ray tracing to materials with 0.9 smoothness, and "Medium" uses a 23.3% ray-count, while "Low" reduces that to 15%, which is barely better than screen-space reflections. This means that depending on the RTX details setting, some surfaces are reflective or not.

Please note that you can use the cursor keys to quickly flick through the images for an easier comparison.



This first set of images highlights the stark difference between Ultra/High and Medium/Low. You can tell from the jagged edges in the reflection of the rifle barrel that the reflection quality (or the quality of render of the reflected viewport) has tangibly dropped.










You'll notice that the gun looks like it's chrome-plated in the "Ultra" and "High" settings, while it's dark in the "Medium" and "Low" ones. This is because "Medium" and "Low" not only have lower ray saturation as DICE has also reduced the number of reflective surfaces in the scene, which includes the gun, by lowering the material surface factor. Not all surfaces are equally reflective, and with lower settings, they don't reflect with the DXR method. This is not new to this patch.

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.