Battlefield 6 review: Laptop gamers get their money's worth too

As expected, the launch of Battlefield 6 was anything but smooth or clean. Players who didn’t get tripped up by the Secure Boot requirement (#BIOS) for the anti-cheat system were instead met with heavily overloaded servers. A few days after release, things have improved somewhat, though the game still doesn’t run perfectly. Meanwhile, the developers deserve credit for solid optimization. Unlike the recently tested and notoriously unoptimized Borderlands 4, Battlefield 6 runs impressively well overall - as shown in our benchmarks - and doesn’t demand a high-end “lunar-grade” PC to perform smoothly.

Visually, the first-person shooter, which is based on the Frostbite 4 engine from DICE, makes a good to very good impression, though it doesn’t set any new benchmarks. The game deserves praise for its detailed character models, impressive draw distances, and the familiar destruction system from earlier entries, which adds plenty of action and chaos.

Effects are generally powerful and spectacular, though at times a bit over the top. On closer inspection, some elements - such as fire and explosions - could use more refinement. On the positive side, Battlefield 6 gets the small details right, like soldiers’ footprints in the sand.

While the multiplayer mode is largely well received, the single-player campaign leaves a mixed impression. Its early missions feel heavily inspired by Call of Duty, favoring large-scale chaos over substance and featuring underwhelming AI. The fact that the single-player campaign runs as a separate executable, forcing an additional shader compilation, only adds to the frustration.

The developers deserve credit for offering an exceptionally wide range of graphics options - though navigating the menus and submenus can feel overwhelming at first. In addition to multiple presets that range from Low to Overkill, the game includes several upscaling technologies. As in other recent titles, XeSS, FSR, and DLSS are all supported. Players can also enable (Multi) Frame Generation if they wish - a feature we plan to examine more closely in future benchmark articles.

To achieve results that are as reproducible as possible, we used a sequence from the single-player mode - specifically the first mission, titled “Always Faithful.” As shown in the video below, the benchmark runs for just under a minute and features countless characters, vehicles, and explosions. Based on our cross-checks and testing experience, performance in this sequence is roughly comparable to the multiplayer mode, with no significant deviations.

At a resolution of 1,920 × 1,080, the hardware demands are fairly moderate. Even at the highest graphics settings, a mobile RTX 5070 manages to exceed 60 FPS. However, some signs of VRAM limitations are already noticeable. According to the in-game display, 8 GB GPUs like the RTX 5070 are operating at their capacity. At higher resolutions, this GPU also showed extreme frame rate fluctuations between benchmark runs - likely due to its limited VRAM configuration. Restarting the game often alleviated the issue, at least temporarily.

At 2,560 × 1,440 resolution with the Overkill preset, we recommend at least a mobile RTX 5070 Ti with 12 GB of VRAM to maintain an average of over 60 FPS. As usual, enabling DLSS can be worthwhile for weaker GPUs, though the performance boost isn’t as pronounced as in some other titles.

Battlefield 6 proves to be fairly demanding at 4k. 3.840 x 2,160 resolution with maximum settings, only the mobile RTX 5090 manages to reach just under 60 FPS. With DLSS set to Quality, however, even the mobile RTX 5080 surpasses the 60 FPS mark.

Performance with Frame Generation enabled is equally interesting, which we tested using the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 laptops (see table). As expected, enabling the feature delivers a substantial FPS boost - especially with MFGx4 - but at the cost of less consistent frame times, as shown in the CapFrameX screenshots.

Because gaming benchmarks are time-consuming and sometimes delayed by activation restrictions, we can only include a limited set of results at publication time. Additional GPU results will be added later.