DICE: Battlefield V ray-tracing performance to be further optimized

With the launch of the GeForce RTX cards, NVIDIA finally delivered real-time ray tracing, a feat that has long been considered the holy grail of video game rendering. But reception among gamers was not that positive, in particular because the technology has a massive impact on performance. While we welcome new tech that increases the realism of games, it may still be too early for RTX to really shine as few folks buy a high-end video card to play at a Full HD resolution.

In an article that takes a look at Battlefield 5's RTX ray tracing implementation, Eurogamer reports work is in progress to boost the performance of the game. DICE developers are still tweaking the ray-tracing implementation and NVIDIA is also working on driver optimizations to further enhance the framerate. There's hope this will significantly boost ray-tracing performance, and the article compares the arrival of RTX with other major upheavals in the gaming industry like Crysis and Quake, which both had pretty extreme system requirements.

As things stand right now, the DICE developers responsible for the DXR implementation see it as a work-in-progress. Further optimisations are due, both in an imminent patch and also down the road as the title receives further support in the coming months. Even Nvidia driver updates are expected to deliver further boosts to frame-rates, such as the ability to run ray tracing compute shaders in parallel. Expect to see more granularity added to the DXR settings, perhaps with a focus on culling distance and LODs. Other quality and performance improvements in development include a hybrid rendering system that uses traditional screen-space reflections where the effect is accurate, only using ray tracing where the technique fails (remember, SSR can only produce reflections of elements rendered on-screen, while full ray tracing reflects anything and everything accurately, within the bounds set by the developer). This should boost performance hopefully improve some of the pop-in issues RT reflections occasionally exhibit right now.