It's that time again, another Battlefield launch. Battlefield V has now come to Origin Access Premier members which we bought into to get an early start on all this testing and try to bring as much coverage on the performance front as possible. Unfortunately even buying a subscription service doesn't seem to get you around the DRM hardware change lockouts so this took a bit longer than expected to get to this point with even more work left to do. After 5 configuration changes we were locked out of 24 hours, subsequently causing us to get further and further behind. But how does the latest entry perform under new partnership with NVIDIA for the first time since it's no longer carrying the Radeon banner of support? DXR Ray Tracing? At the time writing this out I'm actually updating the game for DXR support so hopefully we'll have those results up very shortly.
Testing Methodology
All testing was done in this round using DX11 since DX12 resulted in constant stutters so it is a no go at the time of writing, we’ll be looking into that more with our DXR content. We tested the game at the beginning of the Tirailleur Episode as it’s well lit, relatively open and carries a of the effects in the game so it should be pretty representative of overall gameplay in the single player version. We did disable motion blur and vsync in all these tests as changing the graphics presets turns vsync back on and turns motion blur back to 50%. All testing was completed on the Z370 platform with the Core i5 8600k at 5GHz except for the tests that explicitly state the X370 Ryzen 7 1700 was used.
Test Systems
| Components | X370 | Z370 |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Ryzen 7 1700 @ 4GHz | i5 8600k @ 5GHz |
| Memory | 16GB G.Skill Flare X DDR4 3200 | 16GB Geil EVO X DDR4 3200 |
| Motherboard | MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium | EVGA Z370 Classified K |
| Storage | Adata SU800 128GB 2TB Seagate SSHD | Adata SU800 128GB 2TB Seagate SSHD |
| PSU | Cooler Master V1200 Platinum | Cooler Master V1200 Platinum |
Graphics Cards Tested
| GPU | Architecture | Core Count | Clock Speed | Memory Capacity | Memory Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA RTX 2080ti | Turing | 4352 | 1350/1635 | 11GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2080 FE | Turing | 2944 | 1515/1800 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1080 FE | Pascal | 2560 | 1607/1733 | 8GB GDDR5X | 10Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1070 FE | Pascal | 1920 | 1506/1683 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1060 FE 6GB | Pascal | 1280 | 1506/1708 | 6GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| XLR8 GTX 1060 3GB | Pascal | 1152 | 1506/1708 | 3GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| AMD RX Vega 64 | Vega 10 | 4096 | 1247/1546 | 8GB HBM2 | 945Mbps |
| XFX RX Vega 56 | Vega 10 | 3584 | 1156/1471 | 8GB HBM2 | 800Mbs |
| XFX RX 480 8GB | Polaris 10 | 2304 | 1266 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| Sapphire RX 570 Nitro+ 4GB | Polaris 20 | 2048 | 1340 | 4GB GDDR5 | 7Gbps |
Drivers Used
| Drivers | |
|---|---|
| Radeon Settings | 18.11.1 |
| GeForce | 416.81 |
Preset Scaling At 4K
We started taking a look recently at the preset performance scaling to get a glimpse of performance increases or decreases that are typical when raising or lowering graphical presets. Since we only test at one preset across various resolutions this is to help give you an idea of what to expect when making changes to graphical fidelity.
Ryzen Core Scaling
This portion is actually being handled by another staff member, Alex, who actually happens to have a GTX 1080ti running on a Ryzen 7 platform. He ran these tests at 1080p with the High preset so they will be rather different from the rest of the results.
Core i5 8600K vs Ryzen 7 1700
After further review, we will be conducting this test first going forward as this would have changed the way we handled the game in it's entirety. Battlefield V is a game that clearly benefits from cores and thread count. The 5GHz Core i5 8600k may have pushed just fine on the average framerate front, but even at 1080p we found the 4GHz Ryzen 7 1700 to be the superior experience in this game. So things become more interesting as time moves forward in the world of gaming. We will be exploring this in the DXR Ray Tracing comparisons as well so stay tuned for that.
1080p
1440p
4K
DX12 The Hot Mess
We tested DX12 in it's initial launch like the rest of these numbers it was before any major patching. Something is hopefully in the works because at the time of testing it was a hot mess. An interesting side note was when taking a look at the RTX 2080ti with DX12 it exhibited the same behavior as the RX 480 and GTX 1060, but upon reloading at a checkpoint it smoothed out to parity with DX11, this did not happen on the RX 480 and GTX 1060 so we'll be exploring that later in our DXR investigation.
Conclusion
There was a fair bit of concern by outspoken people in the comment section when Battlefield V was announced to be partnering with NVIDIA and the announcement of RTX support and what that meant for everyone else in terms of performance. I think it's fair to say that those concerns are pretty much put to rest. The game runs great across a variety of hardware and for better or worse bring the cores/threads to this party. After we ran the game on the minimum spec PC and found the experience to be rather enjoyable I had no worries about the general performance. However, EA, changing core counts should not constitute thinking there was computer change, this is getting old so this game will unlikely be included in performance reviews going forward since we were not able to quickly revisit configurations after changing.
