Don’t expect ray tracing in Battlefield 6. 

Electronic Arts is officially skipping ray tracing in Battlefield 6 in a bid to maintain solid in-game performance for all players. In an interview with Comicbook.com, the game’s technical director Christian Buhl confirmed that “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." 

In a separate interview, Buhl noted that a “meaningful percentage” of people play Battlefield 6 on minimum specs or below, making in-game optimisation rather important. 

Battlefield 6 cuts ray tracing to focus on in-game optimisation

Battlefield 6 officially won’t feature ray tracing at launch, and it might not even get the feature in a post-release update. The game’s technical director explained that its absence was purposeful, saying “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."

This marks a departure for the franchise, given that its last two entries–Battlefield V and Battlefield 2042–both featured ray tracing. Developer Battlefield Studios appears to be steering the franchise away from potential performance problems with this change, given that a recent Eurogamer interview also saw Buhl point out that a “meaningful percentage” of players has been running the Battlefield 6 beta on low-end PCs. 

Buhl said: "Min spec is certainly one of our most important specs, it's super important from both a commercial and business perspective–we want as many people as possible playing the game.

"We did a lot of analysis, we did tests on the game on a wide range of hardware above and below our minimum and recommended specs. We figured out what we can hit, what we need to hit from a business perspective, and that was to capture a wide audience on PC. It's been super critical."

Buhl emphasised the developer’s work in optimising maps for solid performance on all PCs, including adjusting in-game maps “so they were more performant.” Hence, players with lower-end PCs might not have to worry about running Battlefield 6 when it launches. 

Battlefield 6 launches on 10 October, 2025.