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2021 Updated Requirements for 1080p, 1440p, 4K (Best GPUs and CPUs)
Last Updated: May 10, 2021Battlefield V, the most recent instalment in the iconic FPS series, was one of the first games to include real-time ray tracing. In action it does look genuinely good, but you’ll need a NVidia RTX card to make it happen, and you’ll be taking a substantial performance hit (though enabling DLSS does help a bit). If you’re buying or building a PC and want to ensure good performance in Battlefield V – whether with ray tracing enabled or without – in this requirements guide I’ll break down what parts you’ll need for your specific performance aims.See Also: Call of Duty Warzone PC Build Guide
Basically, I’ve done the tedious analysis of multiple performance benchmarks from around the web so that you don’t have to, to condense and bring to you everything you need to know regarding the hardware requirements of the game. For complete part lists that are ready to build, check out the recommended PC builds as well, or if you don’t care to build your own PC then see the latest recommended prebuilt PCs.
How Demanding is Battlefield 5?
Skip this section if you want to get straight to the specific hardware recommendations for your particular resolution and frame rate, but first here are the official system requirements for Battlefield V as listed on EA’s site, which gives you a general sense of what hardware is required depending on the circumstance. Credit to EA for providing fairly detailed system requirements, which isn’t something you see all that often.
Source: EA
Even without ray tracing enabled, Battlefield V is a fairly demanding game compared to most titles, even by 2021 standards. It’s also a fairly CPU intensive title, with weaker or older CPUs struggling to reach and maintain high frame rates. Overall, it’s not as demanding as Cyberpunk 2077 for instance (both GPU or CPU wise), but that’s to be expected since Battlefield V is an older game. But turn on ray tracing and BFV goes from relatively demanding to quite demanding, especially without NVidia DLSS turned on.Let’s move onto specific hardware recommendations based on your resolution and the frame rate you’re shooting for, whether that’s a smooth 60FPS or an extra smooth 144FPS (for 144Hz monitors). Note the recommendations below are NOT for ray tracing, which has its own separate section at the very end.
Battlefield V Requirements for 1080p 60FPS / 144FPS
First of all is budget-friendly 1080p 60Hz gaming (or 75Hz which is close in terms of requirements) which many gamers happily use these days. 1080p 144Hz is better, especially for FPS games like this which benefit from faster refresh rates like 144Hz, but 60FPS is still a very smooth experience and good enough for most gamers. To get a consistent 60FPS at 1080p, here are the modern PC parts I can recommend for either medium or ultra settings.
Minimum Specs for 1080p 60FPS (MEDIUM)CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G or Intel Core i3-9100GPU: Radeon RX 570 4GB or GeForce GTX 1650 4GBRAM: 8GB DDR4 (2666MHz or faster)
Best Specs for 1080p 60FPS (ULTRA)CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3100 or Intel Core i3-10100GPU: GeForce GTX 1650 Super 4GB or Radeon RX 580RAM: 16GB DDR4 (3000MHz or faster)
For 144Hz monitor owners, which is the ideal setup for fast-paced titles like this (or any other First-Person Shooter), you not only need a better graphics card but a stronger CPU to reach and maintain such high frame rates.
Minimum Specs for 1080p 144FPS (MEDIUM)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i5-10400GPU: GeForce RTX 2060 Super or Radeon RX 5700 XTRAM: 16GB DDR4 (2666MHz or faster)
Best Specs for 1080p 144FPS (ULTRA)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X or Core i5-11400 or i7-10700KGPU: GeForce RTX 2080 Super or RTX 3070 or RX 6800RAM: 16GB DDR4 (3200MHz or faster)
BFV is quite the visually impressive FPS whether you have ray tracing enabled or not
Battlefield V Requirements for 1440p 60FPS / 144FPS
Moving onto higher resolution 1440p displays, and for 60FPS you’ll need to step things up slightly in the GPU department compared to 1080p 60FPS, though not that much as a NVidia GTX 1660 Super will get you well over 60FPS consistently on medium settings and a RTX 2060 Super will get the job done on the Ultra graphical preset.
Minimum Specs for 1440p 60FPS (MEDIUM)CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3100 or Intel Core i3-10100GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 Super or Radeon RX 5600 XTRAM: 16GB DDR4 (2666MHz or faster)
Best Specs for 1440p 60FPS (ULTRA)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i5-10400GPU: GeForce RTX 2060 Super or Radeon RX 5700 XTRAM: 16GB DDR4 (3000MHz or faster)
But getting to 1440p 144Hz is where things start heating up in terms of requirements, as this increasingly popular particular combination of high resolution and high refresh rate is not easy to run at its full potential (which would be 1440p 144FPS, and ideally staying above that frame rate at all times). That’s especially the case if you want to run the Ultra preset, that’ll be needing nothing less than a monster RTX 3080 or AMD equivalent in order to reach such high frame rates (even with RTX OFF).
Minimum Specs for 1440p 144FPS (MEDIUM)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i5-10400GPU: RTX 2080 Super or RTX 3070 or RX 6700 XTRAM: 16GB DDR4 (2666MHz or faster)
Best Specs for 1440p 144FPS (ULTRA)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X or Core i5-11400 or i7-10700KGPU: GeForce RTX 3080 or Radeon RX 6800 XTRAM: 16GB DDR4 (3200MHz or faster)
Related: Gaming Resolutions Guide (1080p vs 1440p vs 4K)
Battlefield V Requirements for 4K 60FPS / 144FPS
As you can expect, at 4K the GPU requirements are beefy, especially if gunning for the ultimate flatscreen gaming experience on an expensive 4K 144Hz monitor. Getting up around 144FPS at such a high resolution is not easy, even without ray-tracing turned on, and you’ll require nothing less than a RTX 3080 to achieve such supreme performance. But that’s for Medium settings; crank things to Ultra and you’ll need the single most powerful GPU on the market right now – the RTX 3090 – if you want to get near that magical 144FPS mark.
Minimum Specs for 4K 60FPS (MEDIUM)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i5-10400GPU: GeForce RTX 2070 Super or RTX 3060RAM: 16GB DDR4 (2666MHz or faster)
Best Specs for 4K 60FPS (ULTRA)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X or Core i5-11400 or i7-10700KGPU: GeForce RTX 3070 or RTX 2080 Ti or RX 6800RAM: 16GB DDR4 (3200MHz or faster)
Minimum Specs for 4K 144FPS (MEDIUM)CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X or Core i5-11400 or i7-10700KGPU: GeForce RTX 3080 or Radeon RX 6800 XTRAM: 16GB DDR4 (2666MHz or faster)
Best Specs for 4K 144FPS (ULTRA)CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X or Intel Core i7-11700KGPU: GeForce RTX 3090RAM: 32GB DDR4 (3200MHz or faster)
Battlefield V Requirements for Ray Tracing 60FPS
Battlefield 5 was one of the first games to support NVidia’s new real-time ray tracing, a rendering feature that allows for more realistic graphics (specifically more accurate lighting, shadows, reflections and explosions that more closely mimic the real world). But these spruced-up graphics come at a performance cost, and are also only supported by NVidia RTX graphics cards (AMD cards are out of luck for the time being). If you want to run Battlefield V with ray tracing on (also referred to as “RTX On” or “DXR”), below are the PC parts you’ll need if you want to get a flawless 60FPS (or thereabouts) on Ultra settings.The requirements are split up into DLSS Off and DLSS On – DLSS is a NVidia rendering feature that helps performance at the expense of slightly lower quality graphics (that is sometimes hardly or completely unnoticeable depending on the situation) and comes in handy to achieve better performance when ray tracing is on. Without DLSS, it’s going to take seriously beefy graphics cards to achieve 60FPS with ray tracing.Also note there are no 144FPS ray tracing recommendations here because it’s just not feasible with today’s hardware. I mean, sure, you could get 144FPS with ray tracing in Battlefield V if you use a high-end GPU with a lower resolution like 1080p, but when buying a top-tier card the chances that you’ll want to pair it with a “standard” 1080p resolution display is low (for the best gaming GPUs you want 1440p or 4K monitors otherwise it’s a bit of a waste). For suggested CPUs, see the standard non ray-tracing recommendations from earlier (since ray tracing is performed by the graphics card).Minimum GPU for 1080p 60FPS Ray Tracing: RTX 2060 Super (DLSS ON)Best GPU for 1080p 60FPS Ray Tracing: RTX 3060 or RTX 2070 Super (DLSS OFF)Minimum GPU for 1440p 60FPS Ray Tracing: RTX 3060 or RTX 2070 Super (DLSS ON)Best GPU for 1440p 60FPS Ray Tracing: RTX 3070 or RTX 2080 Super (DLSS OFF)Minimum GPU for 4K 60FPS Ray Tracing: RTX 3080 (DLSS ON)Best GPU for 4K 60FPS Ray Tracing: RTX 3090 (DLSS OFF)
Trusted VPNs
VPN software is quite important in this day and age and will improve the security and privacy of your PC when online. There are also benefits to using VPNs for gaming.
There’s lots of VPNs out there but the ones I recommend most to gamers is ExpressVPN (special link that gets you 3 months off. they also offer a free trial here) and NordVPN which are both highly rated gaming VPNs because they’re the fastest and most secure.
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Indie game dev currently working on my first public release after years of hobby projects, a story-driven VR FPS built with Unreal Engine (to be announced soon here for anyone into VR FPS’s). Also likes writing about tech, which also helps fund development of the game.My favs of all time are OOT, Perfect Dark, MGS1, MGS2, GE007, DKC2, THPS3, HL1, and HL2, with the most recent addition to my list of immortals being the VR masterpiece Alyx. If you want help with a new build feel free to ask on the main PC builds guide. If you found the site extra helpful and wish to support the work I do here, sharing an article with a friend helps a lot and is much appreciated. – Julz
