Battlefield 2042 has just been released, and like most AAA video games today, it's unstable. The reviews reflect much on the game's technical state. Thus, it's also one of the most challenging games to run, especially on the PC. Of course, that's to be expected of a game with stellar graphics. Battlefield games have always kept pushing their technology.
Some players, however, are more than happy to sacrifice ejected bullet casing sheen for a bit of framerate boost. Battlefield 2042 thankfully has a plethora of graphical settings on the PC version that lets players find the acceptable compromise between performance and visuals. Players need to take note of these settings if they want to squeeze out some extra frames per second.
10 Lighting Quality: Low
By far the biggest framerate gobbler in Battlefield 2042, according to tests, is the Lighting Quality. This setting determines the game's atmosphere as it was intended by the artists and the developers. It allows how much lighting or light sources are available in the game, making it look more realistic.
Additionally, Lighting Quality also determines the quality of the game's shadows. As always, shadows eat up huge chunks of average framerate. Hence, keeping the Lighting Quality low is always a good idea for those looking to boost the framerate a bit, and can provide a boost of as much as eight percent.
9 Anti-aliasing Quality: TAA High
Anti-aliasing is also one of the biggest offenders when it comes to lowering the framerate. It has a significant effect on the visual quality since not having any anti-aliasing makes the pixel jaggies too apparent and at worst, too distracting. Players can spot this easily from slanted edges or thin lines (such as power lines or grass).
Thankfully, Battlefield 2042 employs the smarter anti-aliasing technique called TAA or Temporal Anti-Aliasing. It doesn't consume as much framerate as the traditional Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA). In fact, TAA's performance impact can be negligible, so players might as well set it to high. The downside is that TAA can make the whole imagery blurrier, as if someone rubbed vaseline all over the monitor. It's up to personal taste.
8 Ambient Occlusion: SSAO
Ambient occlusion has come a long way since its inception. Players will notice that Battlefield 2042 implements several types, such as HBAO or HBAO Full. Those two more advanced ambient occlusion methods are a bit costly depending on the graphics card's age.
For better results and just to be safe, simply set it to the older SSAO. Some reports even discuss that the visual difference is negligible between SSAO and HBAO. If players can live without the penumbra shadows and shading that's made to simulate the scattering of light, then they can turn the option off entirely — but the game might look like it belonged in the early 2010s.
7 Terrain Quality: Medium
Terrain quality refers to how high the texture resolution is allotted for rendering the terrain. It also determines how detailed some of the faraway land formations are relative to the character distance. It's entirely up to the players if they want to sacrifice a bit of terrain fidelity, but in the most hectic and busiest of environments, higher settings can be more demanding.
After all, Battlefield 2042 is a game that renders vast expanses of war-torn sceneries. Moreover, the environment in the game is highly destructible. Rendering all those land scars from afar can be taxing on the hardware, even if most players won't notice the visual damage due to the distance.
6 Effects Quality: Low
Speaking of hectic combat scenes, effects quality is also another setting that can easily drown the hardware if they happen too much on-screen. Since Battlefield 2042 is a competitive game, players simply can't turn away from scenes that lower their framerate and risk getting killed.
That's why the safest option here is to set the effects quality to low. This will notably impact the game's atmosphere. Some smoke pillars will appear too lethargic or thin, some explosions too meek, or there may be less debris in general. However, having enough framerate when needed in a big fight is more important in this game.
5 Undergrowth Quality: Low
Undergrowth quality pertains to the realism of the game's vegetation, usually grass. Battlefield 2042 treats each blade of grass with care and as a separate entity that casts its own shadow — at least at the highest settings. Players can imagine how costly this can be for older hardware.
That's why setting the undergrowth quality to low is another safe call. That will remove shadows and other details from the grass and vegetation, and make them seem less alive or dynamic. But the framerate gain can be as much as three percent based on some tests.
4 Ray Tracing: Off
Ray Tracing is the latest big NVIDIA tech that's being peddled around in the most popular AAA titles. Battlefield 2042 is no exception, and while it might be tempting to see the most accurate reflections and lighting behavior in the heat of combat amidst all the explosions, chances are competitive players don't even need all those distractions.
What's more, Ray Tracing's highest setting more or less halves the average framerate. Even the low settings can still take down some significant double-digit framerate numbers with it. Anyone concerned with conserving their average framerate budget should just turn this troublesome but beautiful graphical setting off.
3 DLSS: On
To offset Ray Tracing's massive framerate hit, NVIDIA was thoughtful enough to develop and release its new tech called DLSS. It's practically a dynamic downscaling of the game's textures and overall resolution, but smarter than the traditional downsampling.
This setting picks problem areas in the game and strategically reduces graphical fidelity with such care that most players won't even notice the quality loss. For many, DLSS is essentially a free framerate boost with little to no drawbacks. It's also almost necessary when using Ray Tracing.
2 Dynamic Resolution Scaling: On
Think of Dynamic Resolution Scaling as a more aggressive form of DLSS, except more devastating to the visuals. This setting lets players set their target framerate, and in order to meet that target, the setting will automatically and reactively reduce the game's resolution.
Doing so will make the game look pixelated and blurry, especially on old hardware. It does make the game smooth as butter, but it's only really recommended in the most desperate of hardware setups. At times, it can even disrupt the gameplay since players might have difficulty seeing far-away targets due to pixelation.
1 GstRender.ShadowQuality 0
Here's a hidden settings tweak that can increase the framerate by as much as 10 frames on average. It tricks the game into launching with the worst shadow quality available. Do note that it won't disable shadows and that the visual difference isn't too bad. Here's how to do it step-by-step:
- Go to Documents.
- Look for the Battlefield 2042 folder.
- Open it and look for Settings.
- Open PROFSAVE_profile
- Look for the config file and open it using Notepad.
- Look for the "GstRender.ShadowQuality" command line and set the number next to it to "0"
- If it's not there, just copy and paste "GstRender.ShadowQuality 0"
Battlefield 2042 is available now for Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows.