Troubleshooting your Battlefield V connection

This one’s on us. When Server performance shows as orange, we’ve been alerted that there’s a problem. If it hits red, you’re likely to see disconnects until we can isolate and replace or reboot the server that’s underperforming.

This means that info coming from you to us is incomplete, some of it is being lost along the way. 

You’ll see an orange warning from 2-4% packet loss, and a red one once your connection hits 5% or above. What you’ll see with packet loss is what most players refer to as input lag - keystrokes or button presses that don’t register properly in-game (mostly because they’re not all making it through to us).

Packet loss shows up more severely in gaming than it does in things like video streaming or internet browsing, mostly because there’s no caching or buffering in-game to counteract it.

How do I fix it?

Packet loss can happen on wireless connections when there’s interference. If you live in an apartment building it could be a crowded wireless channel, or there could be something nearby (a microwave or a smart device) that’s interfering with your wireless signal.  

For wired connections, packet loss often points to an issue with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or with another ISP that they partner with to route their internet traffic.

If you have high latency when connecting to our servers, you’ll feel delays in everything that you do, especially when your latency edges over the 90ms mark. That’s when we’ll give you an orange warning. If your latency goes over 200ms, you’re potentially looking at being disconnected, so the warning will go red at that point. Latency can be a matter of distance from servers, or if you live near the server you’re connecting to it can point to a problem with your connection.

This measures the jitter on your connection to our servers, and it’s a real flag for an unstable connection.

You’ll see an orange warning here if there is an 8-19ms difference in your latency over time, and a red one once that difference hits 20ms or above. High jitter means a frustratingly inconsistent game experience, you may see rubberbanding, input lag spikes, and related problems that feel all the more frustrating for their apparent randomness.

You’ll see this indicator on-screen when the game senses your system is straining to keep up with the pace graphically.

An orange warning advises you to lower your graphics settings for a better play experience.

A red one lets you know that your settings are seriously affecting your gameplay.

Low FPS sometimes gets called “lag”, but it’s rarely anything to do with your connection. Sometimes when there is a lot of on-screen action and effects, a system that’s close to the minimum specs may have problems rendering everything and you can end up feeling like you’re watching a slideshow more than playing a game. This happens when your system is under stress and can’t serve up the number of Frames Per Second (FPS) it needs to.

The Frostbite engine relies on your main processor (CPU) and your graphics card’s processor (GPU). It also uses your graphics card’s dedicated memory (VRAM) when rendering images. 

If either your GPU or CPU are below recommended specs, you may really feel it when you’re playing.

How do I fix it?

Try reducing some of your video settings to combat this. The game may not look as pretty, but it should play a lot more smoothly.

If you’re using DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) in-game, you may want to check out this article for more information on how enabling DXR can affect your graphics performance in-game.

If you’re seeing a refresh rate warning, it often means that you’ve limited your refresh rate in-game to something other than what the server is set at (for example, you’re capped at 60hz and playing on a 120hz server).

How do I fix it?

Increasing your refresh rate to be more in line with what your monitor can handle can mean a clearer picture and less screen tearing when you have vsync disabled.

Microstuttering (tiny shudders and jolts in movement) can sometimes be a DirectX issue.

Ideally, your graphics card should support DirectX 11.1 to run Battlefield V correctly.

If you’re running on Direct X 12 and seeing stuttering like this, head into the Video settings in-game and toggle Direct X 12 off, then restart your game.

If that doesn’t clear it up, try lowering your screen resolution, since you could just be pushing things a little too hard for your graphics card.

Microstuttering can also be down to a driver issue, whether it’s a driver conflict or the latest driver for your graphics card not working well with Battlefield V. If you’ve already tried a clean reinstall of your graphics drivers, you may just need to wait for a new driver to fix it.

Rubberbanding (where your player character runs like they have a rubber band attached to them, and then gets snapped back to their starting position) is usually a connection issue (high latency or a very jittery/spiky connection).

However, if it always happens in exactly the same area in-game, it may be a geometry/terrain issue and worth reporting as a bug.