Battlefield 5 Becomes The First Playable Ray-Traced Game

After production delays and even longer snafus with Windows 10 updates, raytraced games are finally starting to arrive. Well, one game anyway.

After showing off some fancy reflections at Gamescom earlier this year, the release version of Battlefield 5 has finally been patched with support for DirectX 12 ray-tracing. For those who have one of the fancy new RTX cards, you’ll have multiple levels of raytraced settings to choose from: low, medium, high and ultra.

It’s a good thing that there’s multiple presets, because initial tests show that the performance hit is enormous. Guru3D found that performance dropped by about 50% with an RTX 2080 Ti and an i9-9900K at 1080p, with the frame rate hovering just under 60fps at all DXR settings bar low. For reference, that same setup at 1080p with no DXR effects enabled gets closer to 150fps, although it’s not known at this stage what conditions precisely the test was performed under.

Some Battlefield 5 footage with DXR has popped up online as well, giving you an indication of what to expect (factoring in YouTube’s oppressive video compression). It’s worth noting that BF5 doesn’t have an in-built benchmark, so keep that in mind when parsing any results and system specs.

I’ll have a play with DXR and Battlefield 5 in the coming days. While the game is out this week for those who preordered the special editions, the base game doesn’t launch until November 20. If you’re holding out for that, The Gamesmen has the PC and console versions of the game available for $58 until next week. If you miss out on that, Amazon has the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions for $69, as does JB Hi-Fi.


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