While EA and Battlefield Studios have been making it a point to focus on the performance of Battlefield 6, especially when it comes to PC, the developers have also noted that the Xbox Series S posed a unique challenge. In an interview with Kotaku, technical director Christian Buhl explained the difficulties of optimizing the shooter on Xbox Series S owing to the console’s less powerful hardware over its contemporaries.
“I will say that the biggest thing we did that was a challenge for us was [dealing with the console’s limited] memory,” explained Buhl. “Xbox Series S does have less memory than even our mid-spec PC. And so there was a point…Oh, I want to say, like, 6 to 12 months ago, where we kind of realized that a lot of our levels were crashing on Xbox Series S.”
This, in turn, led Battlefield Studios to start focusing on optimising the memory usage of Battlefield 6. Doing this also led to benefits for the title on other platforms. Buhl went as far as to note that it made the “whole game better and more stable” on all platforms. That’s not to say that Xbox Series S didn’t get its own special optimisation, however.
“We were doing so much testing…we were collecting all this data,” said Buhl. “Once we kind of started running all our levels through it, and were able to see where the problems were, after a month or two, we had kind of resolved all of our memory issues on Series S.”
Thanks to these efforts, Buhl has described the Xbox Series S version of Battlefield 6 as being “super solid” and “performant”. He has also confirmed that the shooter will run at a “smooth 60 frames per second” on the low-powered console.
While the developers went through some efforts to make sure it would be playable on Xbox Series S, EA noted that it couldn’t talk about Battlefield 6 coming to other consoles, like the Nintendo Switch 2.
“Sorry, I have to step in here,” said an EA representative when Kotaku asked about whether we would see the shooter coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 at some point. “We can’t talk anything beyond, sort of, like, the consoles that Battlefield’s coming to, which is Xbox Series X/S and PS5, and PS5 Pro.”
Earlier this month, Buhl had spoken about how Battlefield Studios decided to forego ray tracing in Battlefield 6 for performance reasons. Despite the franchise having been a big proponent of the feature since Battlefield 5, Buhl also said that there were no plans to bring ray tracing to the upcoming game in the future either.
“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.
