Battlefield 6 doesn't have "any plans" for ray tracing as developers to focus on ensuring it runs well on older GPUs

Ripple Effect, one of the studios behind Battlefield 6, has officially confirmed that the game will not feature ray tracing, putting accessibility, performance, and smooth gameplay first over visual fidelity.

This seems like a smart move for Battlefield’s core audience. Christian Buhl, Studio Technical Director at Ripple Effect, explained in an exclusive interview with Comic Book that the team has intentionally sidelined ray-tracing when the game launches. In the interview, he stated, “No, we are not going to have ray-tracing when the game launches, and we don’t have any plans in the near future for it either.”

Buhl further explained this decision, “That was because we wanted to focus on performance. We wanted to make sure that all of our effort was focused on making the game as optimized as possible for the default settings and the default users.”

The developers made this decision early in development and learned from its lessons after the rocky launch of Battlefield 2042, which faced tons of criticism for optimization issues and higher system requirements.

Forgoing ray-tracing in a massively multiplayer FPS shooter, which already uses advanced geometry, numerous destructible assets, and sprawling environments, seems like the way to go to deliver a smooth experience on a wide range of hardware specifications, including older PCs.

It appears that this approach has shown promising results, given the game’s record-breaking open beta player counts, becoming the biggest in Battlefield’s history, where many players played the game below the stated minimum requirements.

This is further evidenced by TechPowerUp’s benchmark for Battlefield 6, where an RTX 5070 can easily achieve 81 FPS at 4K on Maximum Settings without the need for upscaling. The RTX 5060 and equivalent graphics cards are capable of handling the game at 1440p. 

Community members shared online that even the seven-year-old RTX 2080 GPU can run the game at 1440p with 50-60 FPS on medium settings with minimal dips.

Battlefield V introduced ray tracing in 2018 for NVIDIA’s RTX 20-series lineup of GPUs, and Battlefield 2042 used ray-traced ambient occlusion in 2021. The absence of ray tracing however, seems like a decent trade-off in a game where frame rates and response times matter more, especially in a competitive, fast-paced environment that the Battlefield franchise is known for.