While Battlefield 6 is far from a bad looking game, the title does manage to have some reasonable minimum hardware requirements so as to cast as wide a net as possible for PC players on lower-end systems. In an interview with Eurogamer, technical director Christian Buhl has revealed that players on lower-end hardware were a big priority for Battlefield Studios.
Explaining how Battlefield Studios managed to hang on to reasonable minimum specs despite Battlefield 6 featuring massive maps with high player counts, Buhl revealed that it took a lot of work from artists and technical artists to make sure that the game’s various maps were performant, and that the title would be able to hit performance targets for even minimum spec PC hardware.
“We built maps, and had to go to our artists and tech artists to adjust these maps so they were more performant,” said Buhl. “We’ve put in a lot of effort across the board to make sure these performance targets were set, and whether you’re on min spec or ultra spec you’re going to get the experience we’re targeting.”
This, according to Buhl, comes down to the fact that players on minimum spec PCs were a major priority for Battlefield 6’s development, because Battlefield Studios wants as many people playing the game as possible. “Min spec is certainly one of our most important specs […] it’s super important from both a commercial and business perspective – we want as many people as possible playing the game,” he said.
“We did a lot of analysis, we did tests on the game on a wide range of hardware above and below our minimum and recommended specs. We figured out what we can hit, what we need to hit from a business perspective, and that was to capture a wide audience on PC. It’s been super critical.”
These efforts were clearly quite successful for Battlefield 6, since the open betas were a massive success, going as far as to positively impact EA’s share prices that week. Buhl confirmed that a “meaningful percentage” of players in the open betas were running the multiplayer shooter on minimum spec, with some players also running the game on even lower-tier or older hardware.
One of the ways that Battlefield Studios was able to avoid bumping up the hardware requirements for Battlefield 6 was by simply foregoing ray tracing. Buhl confirmed that the title won’t make use of any ray tracing in order to keep it as performant as possible.
“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.”
Battlefield 6 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 10. For more details about the PC release, check out the hardware requirements.
