Battlefield 6 says no to ray tracing now and in the near future — dev says decision made to ‘focus on making sure it was performance for everyone else’

Battlefield 6 is one of the most anticipated games of the year, more so because of its friendly system requirements that let it be played even on modest hardware. One of the ways the game's developers were able to achieve this was by side-stepping any ray tracing technologies.

"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," Studio Technical Director Christian Buhl of Ripple Effect, one of the studios behind BF6, told ComicBook.com. "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 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 decision means that gamers can easily play the game and get good performance, even when running older hardware. The only unfortunate thing is that the title uses EA's Javelin anti-cheat feature, which requires Secure Boot. This precludes the Steam Deck and other Linux-based devices from running the game, so players avoiding Windows won't be able to play BF6.

The Battlefield franchise is Call of Duty's biggest competitor, and it stands out by having a destructible environment. This makes it more realistic and gives players more tactical choices, especially when facing an entrenched enemy. Since FPS shooters focus more on tactics and gameplay like this, we can consider ray tracing as a rather unnecessary eye-candy feature that will only make the title less accessible to gamers.

This is similar to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which launched last year, and also did not have ray tracing enabled in the game. There is a workaround to force the feature if you have a good enough graphics card, but it might cause some issues.

Fast-paced games that cater to a massive player base will likely not want to have ray tracing turned on. Aside from the additional strain this feature puts on GPUs, it also means additional backend work for developers. So, by dropping it altogether, the team behind the title can focus more on optimizing the game and making it run great on as many gaming PCs as possible, instead of making the title look better to the privileged few who have powerful GPUs.

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