Battlefield 2042 is finally out in its early access form, although the launch hasn’t exactly gone swimmingly.
We weren’t overly impressed with DICE’s latest entry to the Battlefield series. In our review, we described it as “a game that has potential to be decent down the line, but remains disappointing in its current state.” Click here to read our full review impressions.
Part of why we found Battlefield 2042 so troubling is because of its awful performance on PC and distinct lack of options. Due to the frankly ridiculous number of players in each game, Battlefield 2042 chugs along at a sluggish framerate much of the time. There are a few things you can do to help mitigate this, however.
Screen Setup
First up, let’s dive into the game’s graphics settings. This is where you can tweak the game’s visual quality to claw back a few precious frames. It won’t earn you back a great deal, but every little helps.
Start by making sure you game is in Fullscreen mode. This will ensure that your PC isn’t rendering anything in the background and will fully focus your PC resources to Battlefield 2042. Set your resolution and framerate so that they correspond to your monitor.
Field of view is personal preference, but you should know that Battlefield handles this information differently to other games. This data is presented as vertical field of view from a 4:3 aspect ratio. Most modern games display FOV sliders as horizontal FOV. In laymans terms, for a horizontal FOV of 90, you’ll need to set this to 74. You can go higher or lower depending on your preference, but know that increasing this might reduce performance ever so slightly.
Last up in this section, you’ll want to set your ADS Field of View to “On”. Leaving this off will mean that weapon scopes are vastly zoomed in while aiming down sights. This allowed you to get a better view of your enemies while tracking them down sights. However, the weapons in Battlefield 2042 feature an absurd amount of recoil which makes keeping track of targets difficult. Putting this setting to “On” will reduce the amount of visual clutter.
Graphics Settings
Let’s take a look at the graphics settings to preserve some precious FPS. Brightness and HDR will depend on your monitor, so adjust these accordingly. If you’re having a hard time seeing targets in the dark, consider increasing the brightness slightly.
For the rest of the settings in this section, you’ll want to turn them all off. They all serve as visual clutter that get in the way of seeing enemies, so they’re not overly useful, Settings like Film Grain and Lens Distortion can also look remarkably ugly, which is another reason to disable them. Set Motion Blur to 0% and turn Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain, Vignette, and Lens Distortion all off.
Now we’re at the meat and potatoes of where we’re going to increase our performance the most. Set your graphics quality to “Custom” and then recreate the following bullet points:
- Texture Quality – Medium
- Texture Filtering – Medium
- Lighting Quality – Low
- Effects Quality – Low
- Post Process Quality – Low
- Mesh Quality – Low
- Terrain Quality – Low
- Undergrowth Quality – Low
- Antialiasing Post-Processing – TAA Low
- Ambient Occlusion – Off
These settings will preserve the visual information that’s actually important while giving you back a small amount of frame rate in return.
Advanced Graphics Settings
Moving onto the advanced section, leave Dynamic Resolution Scale set to “Off” as this can make the screen appear blurry. DLSS is a form of resolution scaling that can work wonders in some games. Sadly, the option isn’t yet working as intended just yet. A fix could arrive closer to the game’s actual launch date of November 19th, in which case the Balanced and Quality modes will be worth a try.
Don’t even think about turning on Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion. This will absolutely tank your frame rate for an image that barely looks any better. Nvidia Reflex Low Latency should be set to “Enabled + Boost” to ensure that input lag is kept to a minimum. Likewise is the same for Future Frame Rendering. This can slightly increase input lag, but the extra framerate it provides is worth the tradeoff.
Finally, leave Vertical Sync set to off. Again, this will help to reduce input lag. The last setting to think about is High Fidelity Objects Amount, which should be set to “Low”.
User Profile Settings
Once you’ve finished configuring your in-game settings, there’s actually a few more precautions you can take to further boost your performance. Head on over to your PC’s documents folder and navigate to Battlefield 2042 and the subsequent “settings” folder. In there you’ll find a file called “PROFSAVE_profile”. Open this up using Notepad.
Once the file is open, press CTRL + F to open the find function. Search for “DX12” to find the line of code that reads “GstRender.Dx12Enabled 0”. This setting dictates that Battlefield 2042 doesn’t have DirectX 12 enabled by default. Players with modern hardware should consider enabling this for a small gain in performance. To enable it, simply change the “0” to a “1”.
Another setting to consider in this file is called “GetRender.WeaponDOF”. Search for it in the find function towards the bottom of the file. This setting changes whether a depth of field effect is applied to weapons when aiming down sights. It’s an extremely drastic effect that clouds vision and likely introduces a bit of stutter to the Battlefield 2042 frame rate. It’s enabled by default, but you can disable it manually by changing the value to “0”.
Once you’ve made these changes, simply save the file. You’ll then want to right click on “PROFSAVE_profile” and go to properties. Ensure that the “Read-only” checkbox is ticked and save the file. This will ensure that the game doesn’t overwrite any of the changes you’ve just made.
These changes won’t make a massive difference, but they will help to make Battlefield 2042 a little more playable. Hopefully DICE can improve the stability of Battlefield 2042 with subsequent patches, but that remains to be seen.
How are you finding Battlefield 2042 performance on PC? Let us know across our social channels.
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[Featured Image Credit: EA/DICE]