EA-DICE, in an interview with Tom's Hardware, put out some juicy under-the-hood details about the PC release of "Battlefield V." The most prominent of these would be that the commercial release of the game will slightly dial back on the ray-tracing eye-candy we saw at NVIDIA's GeForce RTX launch event demo. DICE is rather conservative about its implementation of ray-tracing, and seems to assure players that the lack of it won't make a tangible difference to the game's production design, and will certainly not affect gameplay (eg: you won't be at a competitive disadvantage just because a squeaky clean car in the middle of a warzone won't reflect an enemy sniper's glint accurately).

"What I think that we will do is take a pass on the levels and see if there is something that sticks out," said Christian Holmquist, technical director at DICE. "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," he added. Throughout the game's levels and maps, DICE identified objects and elements that could hit framerates hard when ray-tracing is enabled, and "dialed-down" ray-tracing for those assets. For example, a wall located in some level (probably a glass mosaic wall), hit performance too hard, and the developers had to tone down its level of detail.At this time, only GeForce RTX series users have access to the ray-tracing features in Battlefield V, and can turn them off to improve performance. There are no DXR fallbacks for people with other graphics cards (GeForce GTX or Radeon). "…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." DICE appears to be open to AMD sending hardware with its own DXR feature-set implementation, so it could add it to Battlefield V at a later stage. The RTX features themselves will only make it via a day-zero patch when the game releases in October, and won't feature in tomorrow's open-beta. There's also no support for NVIDIA SLI. The interview also reveals that Battlefield V has been optimized for processors with up to 6 cores and 12 threads.