Battlefield V was released some days ago is the sixteenth installment in the Battlefield Series. What’s so new about this FPS game is this is the only game or the first game to support Nvidia’s real-time ray-tracing or RTX in short. After Nvidia RTX update for the game, enabling RTX in Battlefield V which allowed players to play the game with RTX on. The FPS dramatically drops to half of the initial FPS players were getting before turning RTX on. DICE do have plans for that as they talk about the optimization of RTX in Battlefield V in an interview with Eurogamer.
Real Time Ray Tracing RTX in Battlefield V
So, what is this real-time ray tracing thingy which everyone is talking about? Ray tracing is a rendering technique to mimic light reflection in computer graphics. This technology was considered one of the difficult things to implement in gaming as it would take ages to render a simple scene. This problem was however solved when Nvidia introduced RTX technology for the very first time. Here is the demonstration of RTX for Battlefield V:
Should you get Nvidia RTX Graphics Cards?
The very first game which supports RTX is Battlefield V and you can enjoy the RTX in the game if you have the latest graphics card by Nvidia and driver updates as well. There is a problem however with RTX in Battlefield V. Whatever FPS you will be getting before turining RTX on in the game, you will lose half of them after turning RTX on. Let’s say if you are getting a total of 110-120 FPS @2K Ultra setting RTX off, you will get an average of 48 FPS with RTX on.
Without any cutting edge technology, there will be problems with first gen RTX supported cards. I would really appreciate RTX but again I would rather wait for more time as it will get better in the future but for now, would stick to old technology to play at a stable higher framerate.
DICE to bring optimizations to RTX in Battlefield V
As mentioned earlier, DICE gave an interview to Eurogamer in which they talked about bringing optimizations to RTX in Battlefield V for a better smoother experience with high FPS. Here’s a snippet of the full interview talking about optimizations:
What are planned optimizations for the future?
Yasin Uludağ:
One of the optimisations that is built into the BVHs are our use of “overlapped” compute – multiple compute shaders running in parallel. This is not the same thing as async compute or simultaneous compute. It just means you can run multiple compute shaders in parallel. However, there is an implicit barrier injected by the driver that prevents these shaders running in parallel when we record our command lists in parallel for BVH building. This will be fixed in the future and we can expect quite a bit of performance here since it removes sync points and wait-for-idles on the GPU.
They also plan for running BVH building using simultaneous compute during the G-Buffer generation phase which will allow the ray trace to run much earlier in the frame.
We also plan on running BVH building using simultaneous compute during the G-Buffer generation phase, allowing ray tracing to start much earlier in the frame, and the G-Buffer pass. Nsight traces shows that this can be a big benefit. This will be done in the future.
Another optimization we have in the pipe and that almost made launch was a hybrid ray trace/ray march system. This hybrid ray marcher creates a mip map on the entire depth buffer using a MIN filter. This means that every level takes the closest depth in 2×2 regions and keeps going all the way to the lowest mip map. Because this uses a so-called min filter, you know you can skip an entire region on the screen while traversing.
Last but not least they have also optimized denoizer which will be helping in reducing noise which will make it a lot faster and they are also working on compute passes as well as filters that run throughout the ray tracing implementation.
Although it is a breakthrough in technology and it will surely get better in technology but do you think it’s worth sacrificing FPS for a realistic feel to the game? Or would you rather prefer the old graphics but high FPS? Let us know in the comments down below.