Battlefield V RTX Preview

December 8, 2019 at 3:19pm
By Jason Stettner

At this point ray tracing in Battlefield V has been fairly standard, or well generally available for awhile to those that have the graphics cards for it. I was sent over a code to check it out, and thought I’d focus mostly on the Pacific addition that was recent to the multiplayer experience.

This adds two theaters of war including Pacific Storm and Iwo Jima. Both of these are fairly iconic, or at least to what I think of classic Battlefield maps. To further cement that note, Wake Island is coming a little bit after these two released and very soon following the point of writing this piece. If you’re not familiar with that map, it’s truly iconic and considered one of the best multiplayer maps of all time.

This was my first time playing the game with ray tracing, so I also went and enjoyed some multiplayer on other maps as well. Just so that I could get a better sense of what the implantation was like and it’s quite amazing. Seeing fire in puddles in real time, or the glistening of buildings through the various reflecting surfaces and the general light patterns were remarkable to take in. This is of course just on some of the existing city type maps as examples.

This is all dramatically changed once you hit the either lovely beaches of the Pacific Storm, or very rugged ones of Iwo Jima. The former noted map was my favorite of the two. It’s such an odd, yet well paced setup as you hit those beaches and small islands.

If not for the war going on, it’s very scenic and I honestly spent a fair bit of time trying to find quiet spots to take in what was happening. The light is generally just blinding in how peaceful it can make this place. It’s even more charming to see exact shadows through the palm trees, or the effects of even opening and closing doors.

To see how that light is adjusted is fascinating quite honestly, just the luminance of the whole situation. If you look closely at the water you’ll also note the reflections to a minor degree within those ripples, and there’s just so many little details to take in as you storm these mini beaches.

This really gets me excited for Wake Island, as they’ve apparently done work to expand it and the lighting will be more natural than ever before so I imagine it’ll be glorious. I was very impressed with what I played with this ray tracing enabled and pushed highly.

Coming from the Xbox One X version it’s a very big jump in visual quality, and just in how natural it all is. For spec context I use the RTX 2080Ti with an i9 9900k. It’s great to see that DICE is able to push boundaries with tech like this, and it’s a very stark difference in visuals. It’s honestly an interesting change-up in seeing how this shift in visual development can greatly enhance a scene. It makes those beaches look so much better, and it’s hard to not get distracted with the beauty of the locale despite being fired at.

It was also nice to have a good excuse to chill out and play some more Battlefield, it’s not always something I have time for. I will also make a final note that the screenshots do not feature HDR, I was having issues getting the shots to work so I had to disable it for taking these photos. You can read our preview of RTX enabled in Quake 2’s 1.2 update below, or check out the franchise hub for additional coverage of this EA series.

Read our Quake 2 RTX Preview
View our Battlefield Hub