Battlefield 6 Won’t Have Ray Tracing at Launch, No Plans in Future (Exclusive)

Battlefield 6 has no plans to do anything with ray-tracing, despite it being prevalent in a lot of video games these days. For those that aren’t super tech savvy, ray tracing is a pretty powerful tool in gaming. While there is a very long, complicated explanation of what it is, how it works, and how it improves your games, the simple explanation is that it’s a rendering technique that literally follows rays of light. In the context of a video game, that allows for more detailed and realistic graphics with better reflections off of things like windows or puddles, shadows, and more. It’s typically an optional setting that players can toggle as it requires a lot of extra power to even utilize it, but it creates higher fidelity images.

With that said, many noticed that there was no ray-tracing in the Battlefield 6 beta. There were apparently references to it in the command console on PC during the beta, but nothing in the actual settings for the game. While some were disappointed by this as they want this beast of a game to look as good as they can possibly make it, others noted that the lack of ray-tracing could be a reason for its solid performance on despite all of the destruction and busy elements on screen.

Battlefield 6 Won’t Have Ray-Tracing in Order to Focus on Performance

I sat down with Christian Buhl, the Studio Technical Director at Ripple Effect (one of the studios working on Battlefield 6), and we spoke at length about the PC version of the upcoming shooter. Although Battlefield 6 is going to have over 600 different options in the settings menu on PC, ray-tracing won’t be one of them and there’s no plans to bring it into the game in the near future.

“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.”

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Given Battlefield 6 is a big multiplayer shooter, players tend to focus on making sure they can get the smoothest experience possibly by focusing on things like frame rate instead of wanting the best shadows or texture detail. Of course, you want a good balance, but that desire for better performance certainly means ray tracing likely isn’t a priority for a lot of Battlefield players. This may bum those out who are looking forward to the Battlefield 6 campaign, which will be a more cinematic experience where you can sacrifice performance for fidelity, but the core of this game is the expansive multiplayer offering.

As Buhl noted, there are no plans in the near-future for ray-tracing. Perhaps it could come in an update years down the road, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for it unless the technology advances significantly to where it can be added without compromising on performance too much. Either way, it’s great to hear that Battlefield Studios has been extremely intentional with how its building out Battlefield 6 across the board.

Battlefield 6 will release on October 10th for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC.