EA’s upcoming Battlefield 6 will not support ray tracing, according to game’s technical director

Bucking a trend that’s been set by triple-A games for the past few years, Battlefield 6 will not support ray tracing. No ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ about this, either; the developers have no plans to add it at launch or in the near future.

This comes from a Comicbook.com interview with Christian Buhl, the technical director at Ripple Effect, one of four studios working jointly on the game under the Battlefield Studios banner. This interview was done after players noticed a lack of ray tracing options during Battlefield 6’s open beta, and Buhl stated that decision not to support it was deliberate.

According to Buhl, Battlefield 6’s developers wanted to optimise performance for a wider range of hardware, especially so that the game works best on default settings.

 “We wanted to make sure that all of our effort was focused on making the game as [optimised] as possible for the default settings and the default users.”

Christian Buhl, Technical Director at Ripple Effect

For context, these are the minimum required specs for Battlefield 6’s open beta:

At first glance, these minimum specs may seem rather high. For comparison, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 only requires an AMD Radeon RX 470 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960. But in a separate interview with Eurogamer, Buhl noted that a sizable portion of open beta players were playing on or below the minimum system requirements.

The decision to forgo ray tracing on Battlefield 6 was made “relatively early” into its development, so it appears that this statistic happened to align with EA and Battlefield Studios’s goal of making the game as accessible as it can be despite hardware limitations.

Battlefield 6, which was first officially announced back in July, features the series’ first single-player campaign since 2018’s Battlefield V. Multiplayer is still a big focus, though, with four game modes available in the open beta, and more to come at launch. The game will release on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, the EA App and Epic Games Store on 10 October, though it comes in at a pricey S$94.90 for consoles and S$99.90 for PC.