Battlefield 6 won’t bother with ray tracing — here’s why that matters

Potentially disappointing for those with higher-spec PCs, Battlefield 6 won’t include ray tracing at launch. The decision may sound surprising to some, but the reasoning behind it makes sense once you hear it.

Battlefield 6 is set to release on October 10, 2025, following an extremely successful beta that ran across a couple of weekends. Thousands of players queued in the menus waiting for the servers to go live, showing just how much anticipation there is for the series to make its return.

The developers have since explained why standout graphical features like ray tracing won’t be part of the experience.

Why Battlefield 6 is skipping ray tracing

Developer Christian Buhl has confirmed that Battlefield 6 won’t support ray tracing at launch, or at any point in the near future. The decision was made early in development.

The studio explained that it wanted to focus resources on performance and stability, making sure the game is accessible across all platforms. Adding ray tracing would have only benefited players with high-end PCs, leaving much of the audience behind.

While Battlefield 6 already looks visually impressive, the focus on accessibility is welcome. In a fast-paced multiplayer game, frame rate is far more important than flashy lighting effects, at least in my opinion.

Making the game accessible on lower-spec PCs

According to developers, a sizeable number of players who joined the beta were running Battlefield 6 on minimum-spec hardware, or even below minimum-spec hardware. This wasn’t a surprise for the studio, as they had anticipated this might be the case and made minimum-spec performance a priority during development.

Whilst a different engine entirely to Battlefield 6’s, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney echoed a similar sentiment about Unreal Engine 5, stressing that developers should build with lower-spec hardware in mind first. The thinking is simple: if a game runs well on modest hardware, it will scale up even better on high-end hardware.

For Battlefield 6, that meant adjusting maps, assets, and making engine optimizations to maintain performance across a wide range of PCs. The game also includes more than 600 graphical and accessibility settings, giving players fine control to squeeze the best performance out of their hardware.

The system requirements are fairly modest for a 2025 release too. The minimum GPU is an RTX 2060, which targets 1080p at 30fps. Recommended specs call for an RTX 3060 Ti to hit 60fps, a card that can be picked up for around $250 or less if you’re willing to go second-hand or look around for a good deal.

Performance on consoles and player feedback

In my experience, playing on Xbox Series X, performance was stable with no noticeable drops. Both Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 delivered a locked 60fps, even in demanding scenarios.

Current-gen consoles also offer a Performance Mode, which I used during the beta. With VRR support, this mode pushes frame rates above 60fps and creates a smoother experience. The game has even received praise from outlets like Digital Foundry for its polish.

Even when the franchises’ trademark destructible environments came into play, performance held up without issue. Player feedback from the beta has been overwhelmingly positive, with few reports of problems across platforms. It’s a clear improvement over Battlefield 2042’s notoriously rough beta.

Is Call of Duty feeling the heat?

Call of Duty’s unified launcher, CoD HQ, recently shed a huge chunk of storage on PS5, dropping from 126GB to just 25GB. On Xbox, Modern Warfare II and III were decoupled from CoD HQ, cutting down the installation size there as well.

By comparison, Battlefield 6 ranges from 55GB to 80GB depending on the platform, which feels fairly modest by today’s standards. Both franchises seem to be responding to player demands, not only in storage but also in tone. Call of Duty has already confirmed that its skins will no longer carry over from Black Ops 6 into Black Ops 7, following player feedback for a more grounded experience, which CoD’s eccentric skins had taken away from.

With Battlefield 6 arriving a full month before Black Ops 7, it’s the game I’m more excited for, even as someone who loves CoD Zombies. The Call of Duty formula has started to feel a little stale for me, and even my nearly 60-year-old father — who has played through every CoD to date, has chosen Battlefield 6 over Black Ops 7 this year.

Only time will tell which franchise comes out on top, or perhaps they can both coexist peacefully, as Battlefield’s more grounded gameplay offerings might not appeal to those who like Call of Duty’s more arcade-like gameplay.