DICE: Battlefield V ray tracing toned down for performance reasons

Tom's Hardware sat down with DICE technical director Christian Holmquist to talk about the ray-tracing support of Battlefield V. Performance is a bit of a concern at the moment, but DICE believes they'll be able to achieve 60fps at 1920 x 1080 pixels with RTX enabled. However, in some scenes of the game, the developers toned down some of the ray tracing effects to dampen the performance hit. Furthermore, Holmquist also revealed they sometimes optimize the ray tracing to improve realism, because the materials in the game aren't tweaked for ray tracing:

DICE’s Holmquist assured us that ray tracing doesn’t change anything about the way art assets are handled in Battlefield V. "What I think that we will do is take a pass on the levels and see if there is something that sticks out," he said. "Because the materials are not tweaked for ray tracing, but sometimes they may show off something that’s too strong or something that was not directly intended. But otherwise we won’t change the levels—they’ll be as they are. And then we might need to change some parameters in the ray tracing engine itself to maybe tone something down a little bit."

Indeed, in one specific scene, DICE dialed back the reflectivity of walls in a room to help improve performance after it was observed that ray tracing hit the frame rate too hard.