In brief: Owners of Nvidia's RTX-series GPUs got their first taste of real-time ray tracing last month with the launch of Battlefield V. However, with RTX on, the game's performance plummeted by more than 50 percent; even on the company's flagship 2080 Ti. Now, Nvidia says an upcoming round of game updates will improve RTX performance by "up to" 50 percent.
Owners of Nvidia's latest RTX cards were finally able to take advantage of their main selling point last month when DICE rolled out real-time ray tracing features to Battlefield V.
If you're a regular reader of TechSpot, you may remember that we benchmarked the performance of Battlefield V with said features toggled on - unfortunately, the results were less than outstanding.
With RTX set to Ultra, our own Tim Schiesser saw Battlefield V's average FPS plummet from 150 all the way down to 49 at 1080p on Nvidia's flagship RTX 2080 Ti; with the game's other settings set to Ultra. Performance was better with RTX set to low, bumping the FPS up to an average of 72, but it was still more than a 50 percent performance hit.
Obviously, given the 2080 Ti's high price tag, that sort of performance is a hard pill for many customers to swallow. As such, Nvidia has set out to rectify the problem by working with EA and DICE to develop a number of Direct X Ray Tracing (DXR) fixes that could boost performance by "up to" 50 percent.
In terms of pure numbers, Nvidia says 2080 Ti users will be able to enjoy "over 60 FPS" at 1440p with DXR set to Ultra. For reference, our testing only allowed the 2080 Ti to reach around 34 FPS with the same settings.
These fixes are set to arrive on December 4 alongside a host of Battlefield V gameplay additions, including a "single-player War Story" and a new multiplayer map.
If you're reluctant to take Nvidia at its word, don't fret. We will likely be benchmarking the game again sometime this week to verify the company's claims ourselves.