Nvidia: New Drivers, RTX Trace and Battlefield V

Nvidia is working with EA DICE to improve ray tracing performance in Battlefield V with GeForce RTX graphics cards and new drivers capable of up to 50% faster performance.

The main performance increase comes with Nvidia’s new game driver (417.22), which includes ray tracing optimizations in Battlefield V.

The drivers greatly improve the situation, combined with bug fixes and some changes made to the “History of War”.

Changes to the ray tracing application include an increase in the number of rays that are involved in raising the quality level (from low to ultra), as well as settings that allow rays to interact with a large number of materials.

Variable speed ray tracing also allows the game engine to direct rays to where they are important for the painting, optimally fitting into the frame while improving performance. Further improvements in this direction are also expected in the future.

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As mentioned, you can expect a 50% increase in performance, with Nvidia claiming that broadly speaking, you should hit the magical 60fps with Ultra ray quality at 2560 x 1440 using a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

RTX 2080 users should be able to achieve the same with ray tracing set to Medium, while RTX 2070 users should be able to achieve 60fps with Medium but downsampled to 1920 x 1080 (Full HD ).

In our own configuration, we installed Nvidia drivers to run Battlefield V on the RTX 2080 Ti, but found no performance change with Ultra ray tracing at 2560 x 1440 pixels. We’re guessing the Chapter 1: Overture update is also needed to see any performance improvements, so we’ll have to wait for it.

EA was supposed to publish the update on November 4th, but has issued a statement that it is facing some issues and will postpone the rollout until it resolves the issues. The company noted that the delay should be small, we will find out the approximate time soon.

Unfortunately, another glaring aspect is that the new GeForce driver caused some weird visual glitches on our HDR monitor (although, as usual, your experience may be different from ours).