Nvidia has a new 'Game Ready' driver available that is further optimized for Battlefield 5, but what's interesting about the latest release is that it purportedly helps deliver up to a 50 percent boost in ray tracing performance.
This is not the work of Nvidia alone. The GPU maker says it's been working closely with EA and Dice to optimize ray tracing performance in BF5, which is reflected both in the latest GPU driver and tomorrow BF5 content update.
"On December 4th, EA and Dice will deploy the Battlefield V: Tides of War Chapter 1: Overture update, bringing gamers a new single-player War Story called The Last Tiger, a new multiplayer map called Panzerstorm, a Practice Range for players to hone their skills on, and a number of other gameplay enhancements," Nvidia says.
"In addition, Chapter 1 also includes DXR Ray Tracing optimizations, improving performance up to 50 percent, enabling GeForce RTX gamers to enjoy Battlefield V’s immersive real-time ray-traced reflections at over 60 FPS," Nvidia adds.
Real-time ray tracing is the staple feature of Nvidia's GeForce RTX graphics cards, though it's been dogged for two things—high prices and steep performance penalties when enabling DXR.
The hope has been that things will improve over time, both with new drivers and as developers learn how best to optimize code to take advantage of the dedicated ray tracing hardware in Nvidia's newest graphics cards.
As it applies to BF5, Nvidia makes the following performance claims:
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti gamers will now be able to achieve 60+ FPS at 1440p resolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Ultra quality.
- GeForce RTX 2080 gamers will now be able to achieve 60+ FPS at 1440p resolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Medium quality.
- GeForce RTX 2070 gamers will now be able to achieve 60+ FPS at 1080p resolution with DXR Raytraced Reflections set to Medium quality.
In addition, Nvidia says the combined optimizations of its latest driver and Dice's content update improve stability when DXR ray tracing is turned on. Supposedly none of this comes at the expense of image quality.
Outside of BF5, Nvidia's 417.22 driver release also includes general performance optimizations for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth and Just Cause 4.
You can install the latest driver through GeForce Experience, or follow this link to install them manually. You'll have to wait until tomorrow for the BF5 patch, of course.
