The moment has arrived. The first game with activated Ray Tracing has come on the market, and not just any game, but the long-awaited Battlefield V, triple A title that will have the difficult task of satisfying the war needs of many players. Also, it will have to be seen in battle with the much feared DXR and RT in the NVIDIA RTX will you get to pass the test?
The performance of all NVIDIA RTX GPUs when activating RT is bad
The emotion was through the clouds. The numerous owners of the new NVIDIA graphics cards were eager to be able to display the "power of ray tracing" in real time. But the reality has marked its step based on results that many expected and that in any case are not good, but on the other hand, could be worse in all scenarios.
Before starting with the general results, let's start with the amount of memory DXR and RT can consume.
As you can see, the consumption increases between 1.1 GB and 1.5 GB between both modes. DX12 consumes less VRAM than DXR in this case, we understand that because Microsoft's most advanced API needs to reserve a certain amount of memory for ray tracing for the exclusive ALU units available, whether they are Shaders or RT Cores.
Battlefield V 1080p + DXR
In 1080p the performance can be considered as acceptable in many cases, keeping in mind of course the 60 FPS as the limit rate for any gamer worth his salt. The problem is not so much the resulting FPS but the percentage of performance lost in each of the three NVIDIA RTX graphics cards.
Thus, the RTX 2080 Ti loses 44.46% with the first preset for Ray Tracing and is the least demanding of the 4 available (low, medium, high, ultra). We do not think that the other RTX suffer better luck, the RTX 2080 is left 49.2% in low and the RTX 2070 goes down 46.3%.
Focusing from here on in the RTX 2080 Ti for being the spearhead of NVIDIA, as we have said the loss in low is of 44.46%, in medium loses 59.4%, in high a 58.2% and in ultra a 58.9%.
These figures and distances so wide on the one hand and so short on the other are repeated on all three cards, so there seems to be only two settings in terms of performance, low and the others. Will this scenario be repeated in 2K?
Battlefield V 2K + DXR
In 2K, the RTX 2080 Ti loses 45.2% in low, 63.2% in medium, 60.7% in high, and 62.9% in ultra low. Again the same perspective regarding the setting low vs. medium / high / ultra, where the differences between these three move in only 3 FPS, while against Low there are 21 FPS difference.
In any case, the RTX 2080 Ti loses almost half of performance when activating Ray Tracing, bad data for NVIDIA and DICE at the moment, but we see finally in the most demanding resolution as they behave.
Battlefield V 4K + DXR
In 4K, where greater losses should offer the RTX 2080 Ti it turns out that again the data surprise us: with RT low the card of NVIDIA loses 47.1%, medium 64.8%, high 64.2% and ultra 64.8% again.
Before drawing a conclusion let's put the data in perspective:
As you can see, the fall from low to medium is the most pronounced (curiously), where you hardly lose performance in jumping to high or ultra. Also, the subtle fall from 2K to 4K was not at all expected, where the percentage of loss is really short.
What we can say by looking at the data is that it is unacceptable that cards that cost so dearly expensive lose almost half of their performance when activating the lower consumption setting under ray tracing, let's not talk about the other more demanding settings.
On the other hand, as it happened with Physix or tessellation, it is the first generation of cards to introduce these characteristics and if we look at the past, this same thing happened to a greater or lesser extent. It is also true that as we said at the time in two articles, the ray tracing of the RTX is not fully rendered by the RT Cores, but has to be introduced in the pipeline of the shaders later, to which NVIDIA has called hybrid rendering.
So hopefully the performance will be better in future revisions of the NVIDIA architectures, as well as the cards that carry it. At the moment for the price estimated by Santa Clara these cards are little more than suitable for 1080p, where a whole RTX 2070 gets 60 FPS almost by.
Do not forget that Battlefield V is a very optimized title in terms of performance is concerned, you just have to look at the general data of the cards to see it, where a RX 570 or a GTX 1060 perfectly move to 1080p.