WAR PHOTOGRAPHER

Capturing a game's visual beauty by sticking to spectator mode

- Phil Iwaniuk

A lot of games hardware marketing focuses on performance. Esports-ready mice and keyboards. High-refresh-rate monitors that promise you'll see the enemy faster and aim more accurately. Even in graphics hardware, extra frames and faster performance are generally the basis of any purchase argument. But I think that messaging misses a crucial aspect of what it is to have a powerful PC: sitting back and taking the time to enjoy the visuals. Letting the game happen, instead of imposing your will on it.

With Battlefield 6 looming large at the moment, casting its complex, soft-edged, anti-aliased shadow over all of PC gaming, it's especially handy to keep that philosophy in mind. There's more than one way to enjoy a Battlefield game's visuals, and I'd argue the best way of all is to put the guns down entirely and embrace spectator mode.

I first tried it when Battlefield V arrived. It was one of the first wave of games to take advantage of Nvidia's new ray-tracing tech, marketed at the time as CG movie-like lighting which would previously take Hollywood studios days to render but magically now ran in real-time. And as it happened I'd just obtained an RTX 2080 Ti, the flagship card of Team Green's new ray tracing-focused GPU gen.