Even though the upcoming Battlefield 6 is packed with a myriad of visual delights that are as technologically rich as well as graphically stunning, the game won’t feature any Ray Tracing whatsoever and might not even get it for a long time. In a recent interview with Comicbook, Christian Buhl, Ripple Effect’s technical director, has revealed that despite containing hundreds of graphical customization options (as showcased by Battlefield 6’s Official PC Trailer), EA’s upcoming flagship first person shooter won’t have any Ray Tracing at launch.
“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,” said Buhl. “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.”
This means whether you’re playing Battlefield 6’s single player campaign or the multiplayer modes, you won’t be seeing any Ray Tracing effects at all. And although the game still looks mighty realistic cause it’s powered by Frostbite 3 which is one of the most visually stunning game engines out there, it’s definitely a bit odd cause Battlefield 5 (which came out in 2018) had RT even at that time, same as Battlefield 2042 as well.
So from that perspective, the complete omission of RT in even Battlefield 6’s single player campaign may come off as kind of bizarre but the fact that this will ensure the game performing greatly on a far wider range of hardware than it could’ve if it had Ray Tracing, it seems a reasonable trade off. EA and DICE are obviously gearing the game for an exceptionally large playerbase with an equally wide variety of GPUs where having RT would definitely hurt their goals in more ways than one cause it still remains a massive performance hog in games.
And of course, when you’re in the middle of intense and fast-paced firefights (which you will be during most of your playthrough), you won’t be noticing the lack of accurately lit surfaces or realistic reflections in the surroundings, that’s for sure.
Battlefield 6 is slated to be released on October 10.
