Yesterday EVGA announced that if you purchase a "qualifying EVGA GeForce RTX graphics card" you could get Battlefield V for free. This giveaway now has been extended to the rest of OEMs, so if you purchase a graphics card from the GeForce RTX 20 family, you'll get a digital code to download your free copy of Battlefield V. The global promotion is valid from November 20, 2018 through January 7, 2019 "or while supplies last" according to the terms and conditions. It's a good chance to enjoy this game with or without enabling the ray tracing effects that unfortunately halve performance.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX delivers the ultimate PC gaming experience. Game with the unparalleled realism and performance of the new NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture and revolutionary RTX platform as you enter mankind's greatest conflict where no two victories are ever alike. This is a whole new way to experience games. Now, for a limited time, purchase a qualifying EVGA GeForce RTX graphics card and get Battlefield V. See more details and qualifying EVGA GeForce RTX graphics cards here.

AMD today made available the latest version of their Radeon software drivers, Adrenalin Edition 18.11.2, for supported graphics solutions. This brings with it support for the hotly anticipated Battlefield V game title, as well as some fixes to issues that users have been awaiting. Driver software notifications no longer list erroneously the current installed driver version and, more importantly, the annoying bug affecting some RX Vega users of elevated memory clocks even during system idle states has been resolved.

The driver also brings with it support for a Vulkan extension, VK_AMD_memory_overallocation_behavior, that "allows controlling whether explicit overallocation beyond the device memory heap sizes is allowed or not" as AMD puts it themselves. Things are not all rosy, however, with known issues including potential crashing of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey at some locations on Windows 7 systems and possible mouse lag with multi-display setups with at least one display enabled but powered off. This is disappointing considering an older driver update from September had seemingly fixed it too. The drivers are up for download at the link below, hosted directly on TechPowerUp for your convenience, and the change log is available past the break for those interested.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.11.2

Having survived an excruciatingly slow patch update, we are testing "Battlefield V" with DirectX Ray-tracing and NVIDIA RTX enabled, across the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti, augmenting the RTX-on test data to our Battlefield V Performance Analysis article. We began testing with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card with GeForce 416.94 WHQL drivers on Windows 10 1809. Our initial test results are shocking. With RTX enabled in the "ultra" setting, frame-rates dropped by close to 50% at 1080p.

These may look horrifying, given that at its highest setting, even an RTX 2080 Ti isn't able to manage 1080p 120 Hz. But all is not lost. DICE added granularity to RTX. You can toggle between off, low, medium, high, and ultra as "degrees" of RTX level of detail, under the "DXR ray-traced reflections quality" setting. We are currently working on 27 new data-points (each of the RTX 20-series graphics cards, at each level of RTX, and at each of the three resolutions we tested at).

Update: Our full performance analysis article is live now, including results for RTX 2070, 2080, 2080 Ti, each at RTX off/low/medium/high/ultra.

EA-DICE producer for "Battlefield V," Jaqub Ajmal revealed that the studio has released a day-zero patch for the game, which enables the promised NVIDIA RTX technology. NVIDIA used Battlefield V as a tech-demonstrator in its launch event for RTX, an ambitious real-time ray-tracing technology, which works to improve realism by adding real-time ray-traced elements to rasterized scenes. For Battlefield V, this means more realistic reflections, optical effects, and detail for objects and character models.

To play Battlefield V with RTX enabled, you'll need an NVIDIA GeForce RTX (or Quadro RTX) graphics card with GeForce 416.94 WHQL, and Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809). Microsoft resumed rolling out Windows 10 1809 update earlier this week. We are currently testing RTX support on Battlefield V, and will update our recent Battlefield V Performance Analysis article with additional RTX-on data-points.

NVIDIA today released the GeForce 416.94 WHQL "Game Ready" drivers. These come optimized for "Fallout 76," "Hitman 2," and "Battlefield V." NVIDIA re-listing Battlefied V, a game it already optimized for with v416.81 could mean the company may have improved performance for the game. NVIDIA confirmed that a game patch will drop "soon" through Origin, which will add NVIDIA RTX support, more so because Microsoft has resumed rolling out Windows 10 1809. The drivers also add 3D Vision profiles for "Hitman 2" and "Fallout 76." A minor bug that caused lagging on Windows desktop with GeForce GTX 780 has also been fixed. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 416.94 WHQL

The Change-log follows.

AMD has released today the Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.11.1 beta drivers. These drivers bring a host of fixes and performance improvements to a number of titles including, Hitman 2, Battlefield V and Fallout 76. In the case of Hitman 2 the Radeon RX 580 sees a performance uplift of 3% at 1920x1080 compared to the Adrenalin 18.10.2 drivers. Meanwhile, Battlefield V sees performance improvements of 9% and 8% respectively on the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64. It is likely other GPUs based on the Vega and Polaris architectures will benefit from these drivers as well. Fallout 76 gets official support with this release, however, no other information was made available as to what AMD has done for testing with Bethesda's latest offering other than to confirm that it works.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.11.1 BetaThe change-log follows.

Battlefield V is now live if you have paid for Electronic Arts' subscription service, giving gamers access to the title a day earlier than expected. At a cost of $14.99 a month or $99.99 for a year, you can take to the battlefield right now. We can only speculate that this was likely done in a bid to please subscribers while also trying to boost subscription sales. After all, it is blatantly obvious that EA's goal is to try and tap into a steady income stream that only a subscription service can provide. Sadly this has resulted in those that pre-ordered getting shafted to some degree. Resulting in a problem that wouldn't exist with a single set launch date.

This highlights the trouble that comes with a staggered release, someone is going to be the odd man out. Consumers that paid for the Digital Deluxe edition still have to wait till November 15th, while buying the base version means your left sitting on the bench until November 20th. That is roughly 1-2 weeks of waiting and will likely create some anger towards EA for how the release has been handled.

NVIDIA today released GeForce 416.81 WHQL drivers. These drivers provide optimization for "Battlefield V," which appears to be available to Origin Access users. In addition, the drivers significantly reduce Idle and Multi-monitor power-consumption of GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards. It also corrects G-Sync issues with "Turing" GPUs. Stuttering noticed on the RTX 2080 Ti when playing back HEVC videos is also fixed. A number of game-specific fixes related to "ARK Survival," "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," "Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," "Monster Hunter World," and "Far Cry 5" were also fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 416.81 WHQL

The change-log follows.

In the never-ending war between crackers and DRM company Denuvo, the latest victim has been (as it always tends to be) the later's efforts. Version 5.2 of Denuvo's anti-tampering protection has been cracked, opening the floodgates to cracked versions of Mega Man 11 and just-released Football Manager 2019.

Considering the proximity of release for both Hitman 2 (November 13) and Battlefield V (November 20th), it's likely both of those games will ship with the same 5.2 version. The group that cracked Denuvo's 5.2 protection are using the moniker FCKDRM'', which is likely a homage to GOG's FCK DRM movement. This, I'm sure, is well above hat the initiative's objectives were, and is sure to be frowned upon.

The official system requirements for the upcoming Battlefield V game have been outed, and there are three categories of such requirements now: Minimum, Recommended, and DXR. The minimum requirements are pretty steep as they are: DICE say at least an AMD FX-8350 or an i5 6600K CPU are required, alongside 8 GB of system RAM (on the graphics front, a GTX 1050 / RX 560 are mentioned).

The recommended system requirements do bring some interesting tables to the mix, though, with AMD's Ryzen 3 1300X and Intel's i7 4790 being hailed as good CPUs for the configuration. This is in stark contrast with the minimum requirements, but here's the gist: it appears that Battlefield V will be a well-paralellized game, though it will also require strong per-core performance (hence why the FX-8350 doesn't make the cut, and why a previous-gen i7 is higher on the list than the 6000 series i5 from Intel). Minimum RAM for the Recommended spec stands at a whopping 12 GB, though - I believe this is the highest I've ever seen for a game release. An RX 580 or a GTX 1060 round out the specs.

A few weeks ago we learned that Battlefield V would have a battle royale mode called "Firestorm". PUBG and Fornite have made this game mode so popular that several games have tried to take advantage of this feature, and the latest title from EA and DICE won't be an exception. The problem is, that option won't be available at launch, and users will have to wait until March 2019 to enjoy this game feature. The roadmap for additional content has shown how Battlefield V will evolve in the next few months.

This gaming mode has been developed by Criterion Games in partnership with DICE, and 64 players in 16 squads will fight to be the last infantry squad. Before being able to play that mode users will be able to access other DLC such as "The Last Tiger" War Story, "Panzerstorm" (a new tank-focused map) and a new Practice Range mode. Between January and March we will see new content and co-operative modes such as "Combined Arms", and after that "Firestorm" and its Battle Royale mechanics will arrive. General availability for Battlefield V will start on November 20th.

Not quite much had been shown for Battlefield V single-player mode, but EA and DICE have finally released the first trailer that allows us to take a sneak peak at the promising "War Stories" missions. The game will not feature a classic single player mode with a long story focused on one character. Instead, it will include four different missions that bring us to different locations and characters. Those will make us familiarize with several scenarios, weapons and vehicles in the game.

The missions take place in locations such as Nordlys, where we will have to resist German occupation in Norway. There's another mission where we will have to sabotage behind enemy lines as an unlikely English soldier. Tiralleur is the third single-player War Story, and will follow the Senegalese units of the French Colonial Forces, while the last mission (available in December) is called The Last Tiger and will make us join the crew of a Tiger I as they question why they fight. Battlefield V is out worldwide November 20 after the announced delay a few weeks ago.

NVIDIA released its first GeForce software suite since Windows 10 October 2018 went official. The new GeForce 416.16 WHQL drivers add full support for the new operating system, including WDDM 2.5, and DirectX Ray-Tracing (DXR), which are essential for NVIDIA RTX to work. The drivers also add SLI profiles for a large number of games, including "Battlefield V," "Basingstroke," "Divinity: Original Sin II," "Immortal: Unchained," "Jurassic World Evolution," "Phoenix Point," and "Seven: The Days Long Gone." 3DVision profiles are added for "The Elder Scrolls: Online."

A small number of bugs are also fixed with this release. "Pascal" GPUs running "Quake HD remix" no longer experience black square glitches. Temporal AA sharp drops in performance with GeForce GTX 1060 running "Rainbow 6: Siege" has been fixed. Driver errors on TITAN Xp when waking up from S4 sleep have been fixed. Lastly, an issue found with "Turing" GPUs not exposing Netflix 4K mode to displays connected over USB-C, has been fixed. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 416.16 WHQL

The change-log follows.

With the Battlefield V beta only recently ending, it didn't take long for players to start asking how large the maps will be in this installment of the franchise. With the community asking questions, DICE was quick to respond, with Lead Multiplayer Designer Valerian Noghin, Multiplayer Producer David Sirland, and Level Designer Jeff Gagné all responding on Twitter.

An image posted on Twitter by DICE shows the Breakthrough for Hamada map. Giving a rough idea of not only it's overall layout, but scale, thanks to the inserted image showing the player's perspective. Measuring in at 1500 m from the attacker's to the defender's main headquarters, it is certainly larger than the maps in the beta. Furthermore, David Sirland has stated that the majority of the map shown will be available in the game's Conquest mode. While the map is not final, it has been stated that any changes at this point will likely be minor.

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.

Two days before Battlefield V's open beta kicks off,including on PC via EA's Origin, DICE released a new informative video that finally provides more details about the game than what we knew from the time it was announced. In particular, the video confirms that Battlefield V will retain a single-player mode, unlike Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 which is also slated for a Q4 2018 release. This single-player mode will carry on the War Stories aspect we saw with Battlefield 1, with four stories planned for launch date and another slated to be made available later on.

The main highlight from the video, and something that should not surprise anyone, is a new battle royal mode called Firestorm that involves 16 teams of four players each for a total of 64 players per map session, playing to be the last team standing on what is claimed to be the largest Battlefield map ever created. This map is, in their own words, "a sandbox filled with destructible buildings, weaponry, and vehicles" and should interest gamers who like the battle royal concept but wanted something other than the PUBG and Fortnite (although you will note that many features are borrowed from these games as well). More details, along with the video itself, past the break.

Via a blog post on EA's website, Oskar Gabrielson, General Manager of DICE, made it known that Battlefield V would be facing a one month delay, moving its previously-announced October 19th release to November 20th. Gabrielson goes on to say that there are some core gameplay features - "gameplay tempo", "soldier visibility" and "player friction" that have been met with copious amounts of feedback, and that DICE wants to dive into these as it improves the game to "get it right".

Gabrielson ends his take with a promise to "(...) take the time to continue to make some final adjustments to core gameplay, and to ensure we really deliver on the potential of Tides of War", a live service which will replace the previous system of Premium Passes and expansion packs with an "evolving journey" - perhaps something in the like of Destiny's non-expansion content - read, events - updates. Battlefield V is one of the games that will launch with support for NVIDIA's RTX technology, by the way (in Alpha mode at GAMESCOM) - and the game was supposed to drop just a single day before NVIDIA's official September 20th launch for the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti graphics cards.

NVIDIA debuted its R399 series of GeForce software, which could be its final sequence before GeForce RTX family of graphics cards are released to market, likely accompanied by a new series of GeForce software (likely R400 series?). Version 399.07 WHQL is "Game Ready" for "Battlefield V Open Beta," F1 2018, "Immortal: Unchained," Pro Evolution Soccer 2019, "Strange Brigade," and "Switchblade." The drivers also add SLI profiles for F1 2018 and "Immortal: Unchained."

GeForce 399.07 WHQL addresses a number of bugs, including blurry screen noticed on "Rainbow Six: Siege" with TAA dialed up to 100%; diagonal screen-tearing on notebooks with MSHybrid; incorrect OpenGL rendering context on GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1070; missing textures in "Doom" (2016) with the Vulkan renderer; random BSODs on Oculus VR software; stability issues with "LA Noire VR," and stuttering in some exotic configurations on "Call of Duty: Black Ops 4." A key bug with G-Sync stuttering on machines upgrading to Windows 10 1803 has also been fixed. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 399.07 WHQL Software

At NVIDIA's event at Koln, Germany, NVIDIA's Mark Smith took the lid of some of NVIDIA's game developing partners that are working on breinging RTX's improvements to gamers' systems. The presentation started with Christian Holmquist and Jonas Gammelholm, both with DICE, going through the graphical improvements enabled on Battlefield V through the usage of RTX.

Reflections of tank's muzzle flashes in character's eyes, reflected flames and smoke in water bodies, perfect ray tracing on reflective surfaces even with off-screen sources of lighting, static cube maps are replaced with actual transparent, reflective surfaces... And these effects are relevant even in gameplay; these aren't some screenshot-only, squinting-effort effects. You can immerse yourself in them even in the fast-paced combat of Battlefield V.

(Update 1: Added the full 21 games list for RTX support.)

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the company's Koln event announced partnerships with multiple games studios. This is part of NVIDIA's push to bring real time ray tracing and NVIDIA's RTX platforms' achievements to actual games that gamers can play. These encompass heavy hitters such as Battlefield V (DICE), Hitman 2 (IO Interactive), Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics), Metro Exodus (4A Games) and Control (Remedy Entertainment).

However, not all games are made equal, and NVIDIA knows there are significant gaming experiences coming from other, smaller studios. That's why partnerships have been established with the studios developing games such as We Happy Few (Compulsion Games), Atomic Heart (Mundfish), Assetto Corsa Competizione (Kunos Simulazioni), just to name a few. Of course, RTX's nature as a technology depends on NVIDIA's push for the initial implementation wave, and the company will be looking to bring developers up to speed with all needed programming skills, needs and difficulties inherent to the adoption of any new development framework. However, that DICE have already implemented an Alpha Version of NVIDIA's RTX technology into Battlefield V is surely a good sign.

A report via PCGamesN points to some... interesting performance positioning when it comes to NVIDIA and AMD offerings. Battlefield V is being developed by DICE in collaboration with NVIDIA, but it seems there's some sand in the gears of performance improvements as of now. I say this because according to the report, AMD's RX 580 8 GB graphics card (the only red GPU to be tested) bests NVIDIA's GTX 1060 6GB... by quite a considerable margin at that.

The performance difference across both 1080p and 1440p scenarios (with Ultra settings) ranges in the 30% mark, and as has been usually the case, AMD's offerings are bettering NVIDIA's when a change of render - to DX12 - is made - AMD's cards teeter between consistency or worsening performance under DX 12, but NVIDIA's GTX 1060 consistently delivers worse performance levels. Perhaps we're witnessing some bits of AMD's old collaboration efforts with DICE? Still, It's too early to cry wolf right now - performance will only likely improve between now and the October 19th release date.

With Battlefield V's Closed Alpha already in progress, EA has revealed the official system requirements for PC users. The company emphasized that the specifications only apply to the Closed Alpha and may vary in the final game. The minimum system requirements are more or less in line with the preliminary requirements we reported last month. According to the Battlefield V website, the minimum system requirements include a Core i5-6600K or AMD FX-8350 processor, 8 GB of memory along with a GeForce GTX 1050 / GTX 660 or a Radeon HD 7850 graphics cards. The recommended system requirements bump the processor up to a Core i7-4790 or Ryzen 3 1300X processor along with 12 GB or 16 GB of memory. In terms of graphics power, EA recommends a GeForce GTX 1060 or a Radeon RX 480. As expected, the game requires 50 GB of storage space and a 512 KBPS or faster connection to the internet.

EA has revealed the preliminary minimum system requirements for their upcoming Battlefield V game, which is set to launch in October 19 of this year. According to Battlefield V's Origin page, the game demands an Intel Core i5-6600K or AMD FX-6350 processor as a minimum along with 8 GB of memory. In terms of graphics power, EA is recommending a graphics card that's compatible with DirectX 11. That basically translates to a GeForce GTX 660 2 GB for NVIDIA owners and a Radeon HD 7850 2 GB for AMD owners. Battlefield V will work fine on Windows 7, 8.1, and 10 as long as they are 64-bit versions. Regarding storage, the game occupies around 50 GB of hard drive space. For fluid online gameplay, a 512 Kbps or higher broadband internet connection is highly recommended. The release of Battlefield V is still pretty far off, so these system requirements could change over time.

EA-DICE released the first reveal trailer of "Battlefield V." The reveal shows a slice of what appears to be actual in-game footage. The game re-imagines events of WWII, after the series' excursion with WWI. It portrays a pitched battle somewhere in Europe with British troops fighting Nazis. There's also the depiction of female soldiers, hinting at the possibility of strong female characters, or even a female protagonist (as opposed to second-fiddle female NPCs in the likes of Battlefield 4 campaign). There are no technical details of the game, but it appears to leverage DirectX 12 API with even more features than Battlefield 1. Battlefield V is slated for release on October 19, 2018. It's open to pre-orders on Origin.The official trailer follows after the break