Battlefield 5 has shipped on PC, accompanied by our first look at a revolution in gaming graphics - real-time ray tracing via Nvidia's new RTX line of GPUs. It's a watershed moment in many ways and a phenomenal technological achievement - not just from the RTX hardware that makes it possible, but also from the engineers at DICE who committed to ray tracing in all of its shiny, real-time reflection glory. But alongside the revolution in visuals is the reality of the implementation - this is an alpha patch running on first-gen hardware. Real-time ray tracing remains massively expensive from a computational perspective, performance isn't completely ideal - but this is emergent tech, optimisations are coming, and having spoken to DICE directly, we know what kind of strategies the developer is pursuing to push frame-rates higher.

In fact, at the end of our analysis piece, you'll find our in-depth interview with DICE rendering engineer Yasin Uludağ, who has been working with colleague Johannes Deligiannis for the last year on implementing ray tracing within Battlefield 5. First up though, it's worth taking a look at the Battlefield 5 PC tech analysis video embedded below - principally to get a look at the game running in real-time in its day one incarnation and to get a sense of how ray tracing scales across the four available presets: low, medium, high and ultra. DICE's recommendation right now is to run the DXR setting at low for performance reasons, and this still looks great. But what actually happens to the quality of ray tracing as you move down the various settings?

The medium setting is where the biggest compromises to ray tracing quality begin to become evident. The roughness cut-off of material receiving ray traced reflections is raised, resulting in duller materials, painted metals or wood surfaces receiving cubemap textures instead of ray traced reflection. Generally, the quality still holds up, though it's just a little sad to see the view weapon losing the immediate surroundings' colours and tones disappear. Another hit comes from the resolution of the reflections themselves. Battlefield 5 shoots out a variable amount of rays by binning and culling the ray count based on dividing the screen into 16x16 pixel boxes. If an area needs fewer rays, it reduces the size of the box, but on the other hand, if the entire screen is filled with reflective water, it places a limit proportionate to resolution.

Ultra is at 40 per cent resolution, high at 31.6 per cent, medium at 23.3 per cent and low at 15.5 per cent. So, the clarity of reflections reduces as you go down the settings chain but just to stress again, even the low setting is still giving you a proper ray traced experience, with the most important surfaces like water, mirrors and polished metals reacting as they should to the surrounding environments.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings A video breakdown of Battlefield 5 on PC, including key visual features, RTX features and console comparisons.

There are plenty of Battlefield 5 DXR performance benchmarks out there right now, and some of the numbers look low - but revised code is forthcoming that addresses a number of issues that should address the most egregious frame-rate drops. For example, all levels right now are affected by a bounding box bug making ray tracing more expensive than it should be due to the existence of destructible terrain. Certain 'fake' god ray effects or a certain type of foliage can also impact performance negatively, sending out far more rays than they should. It's difficult to get a lock on how much performance is hit by using DXR, as the computational load changes according to content - there is no flat cost here.

On an RTX 2080 Ti, levels primarily based on sand or snow can run ray tracing at the low setting at 60fps at 1620p resolution, where more reflection-heavy maps like Rotterdam require a 1296p pixel-count to remain locked at the target 60 frames per second. We used the game's internal resolution scaler on a 4K screen to make the necessary adjustments here.

Obviously the improvement to image quality will, again, vary by content. On maps that are just dust or stone, the low and medium settings will only see ray tracing make a difference on the most reflective metals or glass sheets, or the occasional roadside puddle. It's only at the higher settings where ray tracing makes a difference here, working subtly on even dull materials. Maps like Rotterdam can deliver a night and day improvement - but again, it's all scene dependent, with the improvement gauged against how well the usual 'faked' techniques hold up. One of my personal favourite little touches ray tracing delivers is a reflection of the player character's face within the glass of the view weapon scope.

DXR quality presets change the roughness cut-off and resolution, but still manage to check reflections left out with standard SSR on Ultra. DXR's adjustments to roughness cut-off can also affect whether some materials are shown at all, as revealed on the metal window inset here. DXR's distance of application is currently flat across all presets, while maximum reflection resolution decreases from ultra to low. Xbox One X does not use SSR, so the comparison against the non-RTX PC version can be extreme as is. Notice how many incorrect bright reflections are corrected with SSR and then further with RTX. Ray tracing properly darkens reflections, which has a big impact when compared to Xbox One X. In scenes with very diffuse materials, DXR quality settings have little impact while having large performance considerations. Reflection occlusion from SSR makes reflections on ultra with SSR more situated than those on Xbox One X. DXR Ultra further refines this. DXR's performance is highly variable based upon settings or scene/level. Here DXR Low offers 35fps at 4K in a scene where standard ultra yields 75fps. Higher DXR quality levels decrease the roughness cut-off, which adds ray traced reflections for duller surfaces.

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.

It's also interesting to stack up the various versions of Battlefield 5 - specifically, the PC ultra experience, DXR and what we'd assume is the best console delivery on Xbox One X. There's no denying that the title offers a big boost on PC compared to the console editions of the game. Based on a detailed look at the various facets of the game, the Xbox release essentially delivers an experience equivalent to PC at medium settings, with the undergrowth setting more akin to PC's high. There are no screen-space reflections at all on the X, so in that sense, PC offers a quality advantage in reflectivity even before DXR is added to the equation. It still looks good on consoles though, and medium settings is a good place to start if you're running a more modest PC.

But it's the arrival of full real-time ray tracing here that is a big deal, comparable in many ways to prior revolutions in PC graphics rendering, such as the arrival of Crysis back in 2008, or the debut of id software's Quake back in 1996. And it's in those comparisons where the performance implications of ray tracing finds some parallels - the bottom line is that genuine, generational leaps in visual fidelity always had some kind of cost to frame-rate. Quake's immense system requirements for the time practically demanded a Pentium CPU upgrade for a playable experience, while the fully tricked out Crysis struggled to sustain 30fps at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 on even the most powerful GPU of the time. The extent to which DICE can improve performance remains to be seen, of course, but 1296p minimum on RTX 2080 Ti for 60fps action is a clear improvement over what we saw at Gamescom - and the developer is optimistic of further boosts, several of which are already complete and ready to rolled out in the next update. Performance right now is a moving target then, but the impact is clear - this is the beginning of something very special.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Digital Foundry's Tom Morgan presents his initial thoughts on the Xbox One an Xbox One X versions of Battlefield 5.