NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SLI Review with NVLink

By Nathan Kirsch

Battlefield 1

Battlefield 1 (also known as BF1) is the fifteenth installment in the Battlefield Series developed by DICE and published by EA. The game is set during World War I. It was released world wide on October 21, 2016. The singleplayer campaign of Battlefield 1 takes place across six different “War Stories” which revolve around different people in different aspects of the Great War in campaigns such as the Italian Alps and the deserts of Arabia. We benchmark in Through Mud and Blood, which is the second mission in singleplayer campaign. Taking place late in the war, the player assumes the role of Danny Edwards, a British recruit joining the crew of a Mark V Landship named Black Bess as their new tank driver. New to the war and inexperienced in driving the unreliable vehicle, Edwards is given a trial by fire with his first mission: punch through the German line at Cambrai with a broken tank and a crew that has no trust in him.

BF1 Through Mud and Blood

Battlefield 1 features the Frostbite 3 game engine and has very good graphics with tons of destructibles. Maps also now feature dynamic weather systems, affecting combat in various ways; for example, The St. Quentin Scar can either start as a clear, sunny day, a dark, foggy day, or in the middle of a rainstorm, and switch between them during the round.

bf1 settings

bf1 settings

We tested BF1 with the ‘Ultra’ graphics quality preset in DX12 with the GPU Memory Restriction turned off. We also disabled VSync. FRAPS was used to manually record the frame rate in a repeatable section of the campaign.

Benchmark Results: In Battlefield 1 we were getting 100.6 FPS on average with one NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti . When we installed a second and initialized SLI the average GPS jumped up to 136.0 FPS. This is a 35% performance improvement. We notice that big explosions in the game still aren’t smooth with SLI enabled, so it looks like this game title will go down as one that was impossible to get a really good smooth gameplay experience since Battlefield V is right around the corner.