Battlefield 6 Won't Support Ray Tracing As EA Prioritises Technical Accessibility

Battlefield 6's beta proved more successful than publisher Electronic Arts could have ever hoped for, peaking at over 521,000 concurrent players on Steam during the beta's first weekend.

According to the development team—a group of EA-owned studios collectively known as Battlefield Studios—a "meaningful percentage" of the players who played the open beta did so on low-end hardware, with some even playing on rigs below the game's minimum specs.

Predicting this, Battlefield Studios has been focused on optimising the game for low-end hardware for quite some time, at the expense of some high-end graphical features like ray tracing.

Performance is the Priority

In an interview with ComicBook, Ripple Effect's technical director Christian Buhl expanded upon this decision, explaining that ray tracing has been sacrificed for performance.

"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 says. "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 optimised as possible for the default settings and the default users. So, we just made the decision relatively early on that we 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."

This will likely come as a disappointment to high-end players, but the commercial benefit of prioritising low-end players is undeniable. Many of the largest live-service games in the world, such as League of Legends, Valorant, Fortnite and Counter-Strike 2, are designed to run on almost every modern PC exactly for this reason.

Given the sheer number of things happening on-screen in Battlefield 6, the game is unlikely to be as technically accesible as the aforementioned games, but every bit of optimisation helps to encourage people with low-end setups to invest time and money in the game.

Though there won't be any ray tracing, Battlefield 6 will launch with over 600 graphical options for players who want to squeeze every last frame out of the game.

Battlefield 6 will release on October 10 for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC.

Battlefield 6

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