AMD obliterates Nvidia in early Battlefield 5 benchmarks

For the past few years, DICE and AMD have been worked together closely while creating their Battlefield and Battlefront series games, leaving Radeon fans disappointed when the latest entry in the Battlefield series, Battlefield V, was revealed as a Nvidia Game Ready release on PC.  

When the game was announced, Nvidia quickly released a blog post on their website to say that the “GeForce GTX is the PC platform of Battlefield V“, leaving some PC gamers concerned that this entry in the series wouldn’t offer the same levels of optimisation for all graphics hardware providers. Most PC gamers remember the early days of Nvidia’s GameWorks program and the controversy that the  Nvidia-optimised software stack generated.

PCGamesN’s Dave James was able to gain access to Battlefield V’s closed alpha and decided that he needed to take a closer look at the game’s performance on today’s mid-range graphics hardware. During his time with the game, he quickly discovered that the game ran much better on graphics hardware from the Radeon camp, especially when using the modern DirectX 12 graphical API. 

During his testing, Battlefield 5 was played at Ultra settings using ASUS ROG Strix RX 580 and GTX 1060 graphics cards at resolutions of 1080p and 1440p. Under DirectX 11 the game ran at an average of 45FPS on Nvidia’s GTX 1060 and 68FPS on AMD’s RX 580. Minimum framerates also presented a larger gap, with minimum framerates dropping to 34FPS on Nvidia’s GTX 1060 while AMD’s RX 580 had a minimum of 56. 

Moving into DirectX 12 the performance gap widened, with the average and minimum framerates of Nvidia’s GTX 1060 dropping to 41 and 29 FPS respectively, while AMD’s RX 580 maintained the same average framerate and achieved a higher minimum framerate of 59FPS. Under DirectX 12 AMD’s RX 580 offered a minimum framerate that was 2x higher than its Nvidia counterpart.