Battlefield 2042 has a new trailer ahead of its November 19th release, and this one is aimed directly at us PC folk. While the action itself is more of the near-future mega-bangs you’ve probably seen in previous teasers (or, indeed, the open beta), it’s all in service of demonstrating the PC-exclusive features: chiefly ray tracing, Nvidia DLSS and Nvidia Reflex support.
Behold:
As always, you’ll need the power of the best graphics cards to run ray tracing, even if Battlefield 2042 limits its implementation to ray traced ambient occlusion – basically the shadow effect that appears between objects placed next to each other. Still, for a while it wasn’t clear if 2042 would have ray tracing at all; ditching it would be a shame, as 2018’s Battlefield V was one of the first games to take a decent crack at the tech with ray traced reflections.
DLSS, on the other hand, was confirmed back during this year’s Gamescom, and will aim to do its usual thing of boosting performance by rendering a lower-res image and upscaling it to look as good as native. You’ll need an Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU to take advantage, though the requirements are considerably lower for Nvidia Reflex, which only needs a GeForce GTX 90 series card or later. Reflex may in fact be the most attractive addition to more competitive-minded players, as it can reduce input lag with next to no performance cost.
Battlefield 2042 will also have an unlocked frame rate on PC, not that it was needed about 34 seconds into this trailer, when performance takes a rather un-trailer-like wobble. But maybe that was left in to contrast with the 60fps smoothness of the DLSS segment that immediately follows? I’m onto you, Electronic Arts video editors.
In non-graphical news, developers EA Dice recently committed to tweaking Battlefield 2042’s maps, UI, and communications systems in response to player feedback from the beta.