A couple of weeks ago, EA DICE officially released Raytracing support for the Nvidia RTX graphics cards. This made Battlefield 5 the first ever game to offer real-time ray tracing technology to be played on an RTX card. However, players were less than enthusiastic when their $1000 cards were struggling to run the game at a stable 60fps with ray tracing on. This, as can be expected, made a lot of users unhappy and there was a strong backlash by the gaming community. This brings us to today’s topic, EA in collaboration with Nvidia has announced that they will be releasing a New Battlefield 5 Update specifically designed to double the performance of RTX cards with ray tracing enabled in-game.
New Battlefield 5 Update Promises to Bring A 50% Jump In Performance, Too good to be true?
It sounds rather incredulous of the dev team to claim something so ambitious, however, I will give them the benefit of the doubt and like everyone else have my fingers crossed in hopes that they really will deliver. Now the problem here is certainly understandable if you look at it from the right perspective. Raytracing is relatively a nascent technology and like any other new technology, it will take some trial and error to get to a level where its performance will be unhindered.
Battlefield 5 ingame screenshotThat is exactly what Nvidia and EA seem to be doing. They released ray tracing support for the RTX cards, it didn’t go as well as they had planned and now they have researched and developed it more to fix the issues. At least that is what is claimed.
So, how does Nvidia and EA plan on giving the RTX Cards a 50 percent boost? Well, essentially it has to do with optimizing the shaders in such a way that the rays will only be projected onto the objects or surrounding world where it matters the most. There is a lot of technical jargon behind the explanation but for a layman just think of a way whereby the Raytracing hardware of the RTX cards will be better utilized for the purpose it was designed for. In other words, load management will be improved.
The screenshot above shows the difference between the new update and the one before. You can see how the fps count is almost double after the update. These screenshots are taken from a youtube video where Nvidia engineers explain the nuances of the new update. This video will be linked at the end of the article.
In some cases, the fps gain is not that significant, however, gain nonetheless. In the above screenshot you can a 10 fps gain which again shows that the new update will be able to run the game on avg 60 fps even at 1440p resolution. This is, of course, is only true if you keep some of the hardware intensive features on high or medium.
Here is a video that explains the idea behind the update in length.
New Battlefield 5 Update Release Date
The update was supposed to go live today, however, DICE announced that due to certain technical complications, they have decided to postpone the release indefinitely. No date has been announced as of yet and we will keep you updated once we hear more from either Nvidia or EA DICE.
Feel free to leave us a comment and tell ys how you feel about the upcoming update.