EA doesn’t plan to bring ray tracing to Battlefield 6 – Good!
Battlefield 6 doesn’t need ray tracing, and neither did its predecessors
When we tested the Battlefield 6 beta last month, we noticed that it lacked options for ray tracing. Now, EA has confirmed that the final game will lack support for ray tracing, and all I can say in response to this news is this… GOOD!
In the early days of ray tracing on PC, Battlefield V was the poster child of the new technology. The game’s ray-traced reflections looked incredible and truly highlighted the benefit of Nvidia’s RTX technologies. That said, these features required DirectX 12 on PC, and Battlefield V’s DirectX 12 version suffers from major stuttering issues. Even now, Shader compilation stutters remain a problem. Battlefield 6 highlighted the benefits of ray tracing, but it also highlighted the issues with DirectX 12 and the downsides of advanced tech.
Battlefield V didn’t need ray tracing, and neither does Battlefield 6
As good as Battlefield V looks with ray tracing, the feature isn’t exactly necessary. The game’s ray-traced reflections won’t give online players a competitive advantage. If anything, it placed gamers at a disadvantage due to the feature’s impact on framerates.
With Battlefield 6, Battlefield Studios is focusing on performance. Battlefield 6 runs smoothly across a wide range of PC hardware configurations. While all modern GPUs support ray tracing, ray tracing remains a demanding graphical feature. Instead of making Battlefield 6 as visually appealing as possible, Battlefield Studios focused on optimising their game for all gamers.
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.
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.
– Christian Buhl to Comic Book
(Does a fast-paced FPS really need ray tracing?)
Ray tracing isn’t a bad technology, but for fast-paced online FPS games, performance matters. Battlefield 2042 launched with performance issues, and EA took a lesson from that. Their next Battlefield game needed to run well on average gaming systems. Battlefield 6 needed to be playable on most gaming PCs. To achieve this, EA cut ray tracing and focused on optimisation. Based on the performance of Battlefield 6’s beta, those efforts worked.
Battlefield 6 is coming to PC with strong optimisation. Add on support for DLSS, XeSS, and FSR, and it is clear that most PC gamers will be able to play this shooter with high framerates. That’s a win for gamers, and that a win for EA and Battlefield 6.
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