Battlefield 2042 keeps Nvidia partnership, will support DLSS and Reflex latency optimization
Battlefield 2042's "official graphics platform" is Nvidia, and the upcoming 128-player shooter will support "next-gen GeForce RTX gaming technologies" (also known as cool reflections), Nvidia DLSS, and Nvidia Reflex latency optimization.
Battlefield 5 was one of the RTX showcase games that spawned the "RTX on" meme, so a repeat partnership between EA and Nvidia is no big surprise. (AMD cards performed well in our BF5 performance testing, though, so owners probably shouldn't be concerned.)
GeForce card owners do get some Nvidia-specific feature support. DLSS is Nvidia's much-used deep learning tech, which in my experience (in Control, mostly) does a pretty good job of improving performance without sacrificing quality.
Nvidia Reflex is newer. Introduced last year, it's a toolkit used by Valorant, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and other multiplayer shooters to reduce render latency by "keeping the GPU perfectly in sync with the CPU" so that frames don't sit in the render queue. (In other words, when you move your mouse to aim, the new image generated should hit your display a few milliseconds sooner than it otherwise would.) It also has some fancy latency measuring capabilities if you've got the monitor and mouse for it. We tested Reflex in a few games, and did record a small input latency reduction, so, hey, that's nice. You can also read more about the tech on Nvidia's site.
EA announced some other Battlefield 2042 partners today, too. The Xbox Series X and S are its official consoles. EA has yet to announce any exclusive DLC or bonuses for Xbox players, so this appears to be purely for marketing at the moment. Its official PC peripherals partner is Logitech, so it'll support Logitech's Lightsync LED control tech and include "in-game audio presets with optimized EQ for Logitech headsets." And you can't launch a big budget game without a storage partner, right? Western Digital's WD_Black brand has that honor. (They do make good SSDs, though.)
Finally and most importantly, Battlefield 2042's off-road vehicle partner is Polaris, and an "authentic" Polaris Sportsman ATV will be one of the vehicles available to players in BF2042's near-future war. It sounds like other Polaris models will appear, too. Exciting stuff!
Alright, not really, unless perhaps you're an ATV enthusiast, but we'll get some proper BF2042 info pretty soon. EA Play Live is happening on July 22, and EA has said it's going to reveal DICE LA's secret mode at the event. Rumor has it that it's a sandbox that pulls vehicles and weapons from previous Battlefields, but we don't know anything for sure. The other mystery mode, Hazard Zone, is going to be shown closer to Battlefield 2042's release on October 22.