The best place to play Battlefield 2042 could be one of our picks for the best gaming PCs or best gaming laptops, rather than the PS5 or Xbox Series X.
That’s because EA and developer Dice have partnered with Nvidia to bring deep learning super sampling (DLSS) and latency-reducing Reflex tech to the upcoming military multiplayer shooter.
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From what we’ve seen of Battlefield 2042 so far it looks rather good, though in the game footage trailer, it wasn’t totally clear on what platform the game was running on. We got a substantial look at the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase at E3 2021, so we could hazard a guess that it was on Xbox Series X. But a lot of those games are also optimized for PC, so Battlefield 2042 could be running on a high-end computer.
Either way, it looks like people who want the very best Battlefield 2042 experience might want to play the game on a PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-series or 30-series graphics card. That’s because those cards have the machine learning technology in them to support DLSS.
For the uninitiated, DLSS is an AI-powered protocol that renders images at a lower resolution, then uses smart up-mixing to present those images at a much higher resolution. As such, DLSS can deliver high-frame rate, pseudo-4K gaming without forcing a GPU to render games in native 4K resolution.
Nvidia Reflex, on the other hand, is a toolkit that can measure system latency and optimize games so that a PC and display respond faster to a player's mouse and keyboard inputs. That’s something competitive gamers may want. Unlike DLSS, Reflex is compatible with Nvidia GeForce cards dating back to the GTX 900-series.
In short, it looks like the best version of Battlefield 2042 could be on the PC, when the game comes out on October 22. Of course, it's still fiendishly hard to find where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and other new Nvidia GPUs at the moment. Maybe that’ll get better as the year draws on, but we suggest that you don’t hold your breath.
