It’s been nothing but good vibes for Battlefield 6 since its announcement and open beta.
By that logic, I guess we were due for some possibly controversial news: Battlefield 6 will not only lack ray-tracing support at launch, but there are no future plans to support it.
For those unaware, ray-tracing is a graphics setting that can provide more realistic visuals and lighting effects in games. It does come at a cost, though, as you’ll typically need a powerful graphics card to pull it off properly.
As a result, it’s something not everyone has easy access to, and games that rely on ray-tracing can sometimes look poorly if your computer isn’t up to par.
Despite the practice being commonly used by most modern games, EA and DICE aren’t looking to utilize ray-tracing for Battlefield 6. Their reason makes sense, but that doesn’t make this any less weird.
Here’s Why Battlefield 6 Won’t Have Ray-Tracing
Christian Buhl, the Studio Technical Director at Ripple Effect (one of several studios currently working on Battlefield 6), recently spoke with Comicbook.com’s Cade Odner.
Buhl explained that while the game will launch with over 600 graphics settings on PC, ray-tracing will not be one of them.
“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,” Buhl explained. “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.”
So, there you have it: to ensure an experience that’s as streamlined and optimized as possible for everyone, the game will launch without ray-tracing. It’s a decision that the Battlefield community is taking well, too. As nice as ray-tracing can be, a good performance across the board is far more important for the multiplayer experience, and as weird as it is to see a AAA game release in 2025 without ray-tracing, EA may be onto something here.
We’ll see how it all comes together when Battlefield 6 launches on October 10th.
