Battlefield 2042 Best PC Settings

In this post I discuss the performance and visual impact of each in-game setting in Battlefield 2042.

Recommended Settings

• Fullscreen Mode: Fullscreen
• Fullscreen Resolution: Native (use DLSS if necessary)
• Refresh Rate: Native
• FOV: 78 (corresponding to a horizontal FOV of 110)
• ADS Field of View: On
• Texture Quality: Ultra
• Texture Filtering: Ultra
• Lighting Quality: Medium
• Shadow Filtering: Personal Preference
• Effects Quality: Medium
• Post Processing Quality: Medium
• Mesh Quality: High
• Terrain Quality: Low
• Undergrowth Quality: High
• Anti-Aliasing Post Processing: TAA HIGH (-0%)
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• High Fidelity Objects Amount: Medium (-0%)
• DLSS: Balanced or Quality if needed
• Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion: Off
• NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: Enabled
• Future Frame Rendering: Off
• Vertical Sync: Off

FOV

The FOV in BF2042 unfortunately must be specified using the VERTICAL field of view, rather than the HORIZONTAL field of view as is more typical for FPS games. Here is an example of two frequent FOV settings. Note how you can barely see the two railings which are aligned at a 90° angle in the lower image, confirming that a vertical FOV of 59 indeed correspond to a horizontal FOV of 90:

To convert your favourite horizontal FOV to Battlefields vertical field of view you can use the following tool: https://themetalmuncher.github.io/fov-calc/

Following a short overview of the average performance that I measured using three different graphical presets. Note that the FOV values in this figure pertain to the vertical FOV!

Texture Quality

This setting is likely currently bugged, as Low until High all result in exactly the same visual quality, using the same amount of VRAM and performing identical:

This behaviour has been reported to DICE and will hopefully be fixed in the future: https://twitter.com/TechGuidesYT/status/1650066644654325761?s=20

Texture Filtering / Anisotropic Filtering

Lighting Quality

Before moving on, lets discuss how to read the following performance figure. The horizontal axis contains the performance of the different settings shown on the vertical axis in FPS. The 1% lows are shown as light blue bars with absolute FPS indicated. The average FPS are shown in dark blue bars together with the absolute values in white and percentage difference from low indicated in black next to the bar.

Besides shadows, lighting quality also seems to affect anti-aliasing as the following comparison shows. Therefore, I would recommend to always run this settings at medium atleast:

Shadow Quality

Effects Quality

Post Processing Quality

Mesh Quality

Terrain Quality

While a clear performance drop can be observed with increased Terrain Quality, there does not appear to be any noticeable visual difference.

Undergrowth Quality

Ambient Occlusion

DLSS