Gadgetory

welcome back to hard rom box there's a lot of battlefield 5 testing on the channel lately earlier in this week Steve looked at how battlefield 5 performs with the range of GPUs then a few days ago we looked at our TX performance and hopefully we'll have something up on CPU performance shortly as well though with battlefield 5s and knowing limits that might take a little while but in today's video I'm gonna be talking about how to get the best performance out of battlefield 5s regular settings without sacrificing too much from visual quality similar to our previous game optimization videos this video is going to be slightly different to our guides for games like shadow of the Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed Odyssey primarily because those games are single-player focused whereas most people are buying battlefield 5 for the multiplayer so the settings we're targeting today I decided to create the best setup for competitive play namely high frame rates without the game looking like a complete garbage where possible so battlefield 5 is quite well optimized so there aren't a lot of settings where you can just tweak a few things and get free performance a lot of what we're going to talk about will come down to trade-offs between quality and performance unfortunately though it does have that pesky 5 Hardware change limit so this did limit the scope of their testing a little bit that said we did manage to test battlefield 5 across a small selection of GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA and are both high end and mid-range price points all testing was done with our core i7 8700 K test system overclocked to 4.9 gigahertz with 16 gigabytes of RAM and awful did you see in this video is captured at 4k using the GeForce r-tx 20 ATT I though do note that the footage doesn't always correspond to the exact areas we used for performance testing all framerate numbers you see are from the same benchmark run noting that there's you know no in-game benchmark in this game we also tested in the single-player campaign only this is because testing in multi players are lot harder in fact it's basically impossible for any sort of repetitive accurate testing but I did play a small amount of multiplayer and the results here do largely line up with what you'll see in many of the multiplayer maps it's also especially important to note here we were GPU bound for basically all of this testing in this sort of game though not everyone will be GPU bound depending on your CPU the framerate you're targeting and whether you're playing multiplayer a single player you could run into CPU bottlenecks if you are CPU bound you don't usually see a drop in framerate when you increase quality settings so tweaking things for your setup is ideal in that situation final note for this video we recommend watching in 4k to avoid YouTube's compression as much as possible we do have a source quality download available for our patreon stew links to that in the description if you want to see everything at a very high bitrate so battlefield 5 is a fairly simple game in terms of its quality settings we have four basic presets ultra high medium and low and nearly every individual setting also has those modes so when you set the game to ultra every setting is set to ultra and when you go down to medium all the settings also go down to medium it's a nice and simple system the two exceptions are the anti-aliasing and ambient occlusion settings those stick to ta a high + HB AO respectively for every preset except low where they go down to the lowest setting before discussing the piece that's in detail I do recommend a few basic settings outside of the presets for everyone to use DirectX 12 has a few issues in this game so I'd recommend sticking to DirectX 11 I'd also set the frame rate limiter to its higher setting of 200 and keep future frame rendering set to on this is a bit of a weird setting it does seem to reduce input lag when vsync is enabled but for most people I'd recommend vsync disabled in this game and just let it run at the highest framerate possible in the basic settings I also disabled every effect including film grain and depth of field I think that's best for a competitive multiplayer title with that out of the way let's take a look at the presets with cards like the AMD Radeon rx 570 delivering above 60fps at 1080p with the ultra preset I reckon it's the go-to here for most gamers that don't want to optimize things further it looks great everything is maxed out and it runs well on mid-range Hardware that's the sign of a well optimized title and dice it seems to be delivering again here with battlefield fight even 1440p gamers with something like a gtx 1070 can comfortably play above 60fps with the ultra preset so yes good one here I don't see much reason to drop to the high preset there are some slight visual changes like small reductions to shadow quality draw distance and foliage density but it's not a huge downgrade then you move to medium and you start to see some effects falling away in particular the lack of screens based reflections on water puddles while low turns everything down to poor quality for the best performance looking at the performance breakdown again I don't recommend using the high preset because the performance increase in most situations is only around 5 to 10 percent steve tested in a slightly more demanding area than i did for this benchmarking and found a higher margin than this however i tested across several different areas with wildly different environments and the results you see here are quite typical and this makes sense because there's not a massive difference in visual quality for those who want more performance I just go straight to the medium preset it provides 30% more performance than ultra and still looks ok I'd only recommend the low preset for those with entry-level Hardware struggling to play at 60fps it doesn't look great though it does perform pretty well now let's move into the individual settings for a better look and honestly there's quite a lot of changes you can make here if you want to target performance if you're more after visual quality just slapping an ultra and call it a day because performance is pretty good if you have a high refresh monitor and want to targets a 100-plus FPS or just want the highest frame rate for the lowest input latency you'll want to use a combination of ultra medium and even low settings to hit those high frame rates without having to resort to the potato quality provided by the low preset first up we have texture quality and this is a setting that's a bit strange in battlefield 5 it doesn't seem to impact the quality of most textures particularly those close to the player but that can depend on the area there's also some weirdness here where the game uses very low quality textures for things like static vehicle wheels and wood but then high quality textures for clothes and rocks this mixture means in some areas the game looks great and in others looks pretty bad I did spot a few loading issues to wear high and low quality textures are repeatedly swapped it's a bit distracting and I hope this is fixed in a patch in terms of performance though a very simple quality setting you want to chuck it on ultra unless you have a mid-range card that's starved of VRAM in some areas like snow environments you do get higher quality textures and it's worth it for most players texture filtering is interesting because this is another feature we normally recommend people leave on the maximum setting but in battlefield 5 there's very little visual difference between any of the filtering modes at 4k going from Ultra to low you'll only spot a small reduction in clarity for a few on-screen textures usually those are weird angles and in the game where you're running around pulling headshots honestly you probably won't notice the difference that said for those that do want to preserve to extra quality I'd keep it on an ultra but for anyone that wants to target performance you can get a healthy 3% boost to performance if you chuck it on low which is my recommendation here there's not a huge quality difference between low and medium so it's worth getting that extra performance and just putting the setting all the way down to low if framerate is your thing lighting quality is an influential setting when it comes to performance as it controls the quality of shadows the Ultra setting has the sharpest densest shadows with the greatest draw distance and then with each quality setting drop all three of those areas fall away when you get down to the low setting shadow draw distance for things like branches on trees is pretty pathetic though it doesn't completely get rid of shadows like the lowest modes do in some games we're looking at performance I almost have three recommendations here Ultra has the sharpest shadow so if you favor visual quality it's the go-to but if you're struggling for performance the first change I'd make is to drop it down to high your frame rate will increase by 5% and the quality loss isn't significant then for those targeting high frame rates the medium setting is my recommendation providing 7% more performance than ultra with still acceptable quality there isn't a large enough jump to performance to justify using low compared to medium at least in my opinion effects quality is one of the more subtle settings in the game and to be honest I was only able to spot a change moving from high down to medium this setting appears to affect how point lighting interacts with surfaces in the world so on the high or ultra settings a fire in front of a car can emit a glow underneath the chassis for example this car disappears when using medium or low throughout our benchmark run we observed a three percent uplift of performance using the medium setting compared to either high or ultra so dropping effects down to medium is a good choice for those targeting performance if you're more after visual quality again just chuck it on ultra post-process quality is the most demanding setting in the game as it controls where the screen space reflections are applied to water services such as puddles the main difference I spotted was simply where the SSR is enabled or disabled with the medium and low settings SSR is completely disabled which results in no reflections on the surface of water which is a massive visual downgrade ultra and high has SSR enabled and honestly I couldn't tell the performance between them however there is a performance difference between all four modes which surprised me a little bit what was especially surprising is the 2% performance drop moving from ultra to high normally you expect to gain performance when decreasing a visual setting but not in this case and i triple-checked this result across multiple areas so Ultra is the obvious choice for those that want the best visual quality if you want to gain a significant amount of performance I'd suggest chucking this setting on low skipping medium entirely your frame rate will increase by upwards of 15% with this setting choice and while the game doesn't look as good visually without water reflections it's a really handy way to up your frames per second mesh quality isn't worth discussing as it has no real impact on performance I'd keep this one on ultra unless you are running an entry-level GPU that is struggling under a high geometry load terrain quality is one of those settings which has a nice balance between visual quality and performance each of the four modes does deliver a different terrain quality level and each also comes with the performance improvement Ultra has the most dense terrain with the best draw distance and each of these aspects falls away with high and medium low basically flattens the entire terrain out so it's not a setting I'd recommend looking at the performance breakdown it's really a toss-up as to which setting makes the most sense because each comes with a different visual quality those targeting quality we'll want to keep it on ultra I suspect though for the best performance I drop it down to medium for a 2 to 3 percent performance improvement in framerate low does improve things again compared to medium but the quality drop doesn't seem worth the small improvement to performance undergrowth quality like terrain quality delivers a noticeable quality difference but in each of the four settings ultra has the most dense ground-level foliage while low removes a lot of the grass and small plants around the environment note that trees larger bushes and some of the leaf particle effects are unaffected by this setting what setting to use really depends on how competitive you want to be in my opinion those that want the best visual quality should again off for ultra because it delivers the most dense environment but some enemies could be partially obscured by the grass and foliage elements introduced by higher quality settings which would make them harder to spot so for those that want to go full competitive I would recommend dropping this setting too low which I guess you also pick up a 4% improvement to performance in the process this is really the only setting where the visual quality change from dropping to a lower setting could give you a competitive advantage there isn't any other setting that simply removes objects from the game world it's probably only a small advantage but I'm sure it's one that some people would like to have for anti-aliasing we have two modes both of which use temporal anti-aliasing or taa luckily taa has come a long way in the past few years to the point where some of the better implementations are actually worth using in battlefield 5 the taa high setting does a good job of smoothing out jagged edges without destroying texture quality so it gets my recommendation taa low noticeably blurs the image and reduces texture quality and as it only introduces a 4% improvement to frame rate I wouldn't bother using it the vinyl setting here is ambient occlusion which impacts the soft shadowing and the general depth to the game world interestingly dice provides an SSAO option but doesn't use it for any of the presets instead preferring HPA oh and that's for a good reason as HPA o delivers more depth than ssao for a better image while off of course removes ambient occlusion and leaves the image looking a bit flat in terms of performance impact opting for SSAO over hpi-o delivers a performance improvement below 1% so it's not worth using I would however recommend switching ambient occlusion off for those that want to target framerate so after exploring all the quality options it's nice to be able to validate that yes the ultra quality preset is in fact worth using for those that want the best visual quality there's no funny business here dice has created a series of ultra settings where the highest mode does in fact bring a caller humph often at little cost to performance at a cost that's in line with the visual improvement there are no settings which unnecessarily tank performance when you flick them up to ultra and that's great to see especially as the ultra setting does look pretty great that said if you want to target frame rate over visual quality there are a number of tweaks I'd make rather than simply sticking to the medium preset which turns down settings like texture and mesh quality unnecessarily for a nice balance of performance and visual quality I'd recommend the following settings textures on ultra texture filtering on low lighting and effects on medium post process and mesh on ultra terrain on medium undergrowth on low anti-aliasing on TA a high and ambient occlusion on HB a o these settings do reduce the visual quality compared to ultra but your frame rate also increases by around 18% on average and with undergrowth set to low it should be slightly easier to spot enemies in competitive multiplayer which is a nice bonus considering it rinsed the world of foliage density without r-tx 20 atti this was the difference between playing at mid to low 80s in terms of frame rate and up around the 100 FPS mark at 4k those would say at gtx 1060 are looking at an extra 10 FPS at 1080p and it will ensure a card like the gtx 970 stays above 60fps for those that really want to target performance I'd suggest to further tweaks setting post process quality to low and ambient occlusion to off those extra changes lead to a 45 percent performance improvement over the Ultra preset which is perfect for high refresh rate gaming placing it between the medium and low presets in terms of performance however it doesn't look anywhere near as bad as the low preset in fact it looks pretty similar to medium but with better textures and geometry and again reduced foliage density for that potential competitive advantage using these performance based settings makes a card like and rx by value suitable for high refresh rate gaming at 1080p where it previously struggled to hit 90 FPS using the ultra preset it's now up over 120 fps and it's a similar story for the GTX 10 70 at 1440p which is great news for those that want to game with high refresh 1440p monitors that said in either case you'll need to make sure you're not getting cpu bottleneck so yeah overall I'm fairly impressed with the quality settings on hand here in battlefield 5 the ultra preset is decent you can turn off a few things to gain large performance improvements without completely destroying how the game looks so depending on whether you want visual quality or high frame rate gaming there's something here for everyone it's particularly nice that the effects like explosions and particles aren't heavily impacted by the quality settings while typical settings like textures and mesh quality can be kept at high levels with little performance penalty and of course if you're interested in ray-tracing performance we have a separate video that's already up on the channel covering that we recommend everyone leave rate rating disabled though if you are serious about playing this game a decent frame rates especially even on the RT x20 atti that's it for this quality optimization video there's been a few other game releases recently that I basically have to get to right away namely hitman 2 and fallout 76 so I'm certainly very busy at the moment as always you can subscribe for more videos like this from us particularly in the next few weeks consider supporting us on patreon to get access to the source quality version of this video as well as an exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams and I'll catch you in the next one