[TH]Battlefield V Creators: We Toned Down Ray Tracing for Performance, Realism

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PontiacGTX

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During the demo, certain effects did stand out as if they were exaggerated to showcase Nvidia’s RTX technology, though. Windows in the Rotterdam map were perfectly reflective and paint on the cars was mirror-finished.

DICE’s Holmquist assured us that ray tracing doesn’t change anything about the way art assets are handled in Battlefield V. "What I think that we will do is take a pass on the levels and see if there is something that sticks out," he said. "Because the materials are not tweaked for ray tracing, but sometimes they may show off something that’s too strong or something that was not directly intended. But otherwise we won’t change the levels—they’ll be as they are. And then we might need to change some parameters in the ray tracing engine itself to maybe tone something down a little bit."

Indeed, in one specific scene, DICE dialed back the reflectivity of walls in a room to help improve performance after it was observed that ray tracing hit the frame rate too hard.

"So, what we have done with our DXR implementation is we go very wide with a lot of cores to offload that work," Holmquist replied. "So we’re likely going to require a higher minimum spec and recommended spec for using RT, and that was the idea from the start. It won’t affect the gameplay performance, but we might need to increase the hardware requirements a little bit. And going wide is the best way for the consumer in this regard because you can have a four-core or six-core machine. It's a little bit easier these days for the consumer to go wide with more threads than have higher clocks."

It sounds like the engine is optimized for six-core CPUs with simultaneous multi-threading but may work well on 4C/8T processors as well.

Holmquist clarifies, “…we only talk with DXR. Because we have been running only Nvidia hardware, we know that we have optimized for that hardware. We’re also using certain features in the compiler with intrinsics, so there is a dependency. That can be resolved as we get hardware from another potential manufacturer. But as we tune for a specific piece of hardware, dependencies do start to go in, and we’d need another piece of hardware in order to re-tune.”

We’re actually a bit surprised that DICE eschewed multi-GPU support. Right now, DICE is targeting 1920x1080 at 60 FPS with RTX enabled. Surely, a second GeForce would be a great way to scale such a taxing workload, particularly since Nvidia offers up to two NVLink sub-links with 100 GB/s of bi-directional throughput for card-to-card communication.

While we couldn’t get anyone at Nvidia to comment on dependencies that would preclude a DXR-enabled game from rendering properly in AFR mode, we did ask Epic Games’ Tim Sweeny about hypothetical limitations.

“Multi-GPU scenarios are all workable for ray tracing. There aren’t any new dependencies between frames. The only limiting factor is cost," Sweeny said.
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Sodapopjones said:
I believe Adam Jensen said it best, "I never asked for this".
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