Battlefield 6 Ditches Ray Tracing
The Battlefield franchise was one of the first to implement ray tracing, but now it's become one of the first to break away from it. The system requirements for Battlefield 6 have been released, offering no ray tracing option whatsoever. The title's developer, Ripple Effect, even put technical director Christian Buhl in front of the press to confirm it.
"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 said.
Ray tracing was introduced in the Nvidia RTX 2000 series of graphics cards, with the first "RTX" cards fitted with first-generation RT cores that could provide basic ray tracing acceleration. They've since gotten a lot better, and modern AMD and Nvidia cards are very capable of ray tracing. But they're also very expensive, and for most gamers, it's just not an option they often turn on. To make Battlefield 6 more accessible, the developers have decided to leave it out.
Although ray tracing has successfully beautified many older games, like Portal, Half-Life 2, and Quake 2, it's also often only really usable on the most capable GPUs. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are clear examples of how good games can look if you have the hardware to run them well. Everyone else, though, is left out.
No raytracing in sight, but lots of upscaling, even at the top-end.Credit: Ripple Effect
They won't have to miss out on Battlefield 6, though, as it doesn't offer ray tracing at all. Perhaps a ray tracing patch will show up down the line, but it's very clearly not a priority. Ripple Effect seems more keen on maximizing frame rates and making the game accessible to a broader segment of the gaming community.
A part of that is improving access to upscalers. The game supports AMD's FSR 4 , Nvidia's DLSS 4, and Intel's XeSS 2. It also has its own native upscaler, which can be used on the oldest GPUs that don't support more modern options—as long as they support DX12—think AMD 7970 (from 2011!) or newer.
VideoCardz speculates that Battlefield is ditching raytracing this time around because of the experience of Battlefield 2042. When it debuted, it was plagued with complaints over its performance and optimization. Ripple Effect also received a lot of praise during a recent beta test of Battlefield 6 for its impressive performance, so it has every reason to continue with this strategy at the full launch.
Want to see how good your system is at handling ray tracing? Try this benchmark on for size .
