While EA has been an early adopter of ray tracing with the Battlefield series since Nvidia first introduced its GeForce RTX 2000 series of GPUs, the company has since decided to take a step back from this. In an interview with Comicbook.com, Ripple Effect’s studio technical director Christian Buhl has confirmed that the upcoming Battlefield 6 will not support ray tracing.
The announcement comes despite the title making use of other features from Nvidia’s RTX GPUs as well as Intel’s and AMD’s current-gen GPUs, including DLSS 4, FSR 4 and XeSS 2. Buhl said that the decision to forego ray tracing came down to the fact that development was more focused on making sure Battlefield 6 performs well on a wide range of hardware. He also said that there are no plans to bring ray tracing to the game in a future update.
“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,” said Buhl. “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. So, we just made the decision relatively early on that we just weren’t going to do ray-tracing and again, it was mostly so that we could focus on making sure it was performance for everyone else.”
For those that might not remember, Battlefield 5 and its ray tracing support was a major part of the marketing behind the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2000 series of graphics cards when the title and the GPU line-up were coming out back in 2018. Since then, however, ray tracing has become a more common technology supported by AAA games.
The fact that EA and the studios under the Battlefield Studios banner – Ripple Effect, Criterion, Motive Studios and DICE – have opted to forego ray tracing despite boasting about all of the options that PC players will have to tweak the game in a recent trailer might indicate that, while performance was a priority, the time and resources it would take to even allow for ray tracing as an option for PC players was considered to be not worth it.
Battlefield 6 got a trailer showcasing the PC centric features just last week, with confirmed support for things like 4K graphics, uncapped frame rates, and ultrawide displays. The trailer also gave us a glimpse at Portal, as well as the server browser that will be housed inside the menu option. If you’re curious about what kind of PC hardware you’ll need to run the upcoming multiplayer shooter, check out our coverage of the required hardware specs from back in August.
In the meantime, Battlefield 6 will continue with its playtests with next round of Battlefield Labs. The playtests will this time focus around combined arms gameplay, as well as the UI and UX behind the server browser in Portal.
Battlefield 6 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 10.
