Battlefield 6 Won't Be Getting Ray Tracing, Developers Confirm

As the issues of poor optimization and AAA games being unplayable on all but top-of-the-line, 5090-powered PCs become more and more prevalent these days, certain games gain a lot of goodwill even before launch simply by keeping in mind that not every player has access to the best hardware on the market.

One such game is Battlefield 6, which was recently praised for its relatively forgiving system requirements – at least by 2025 AAA standards – and shortly later confirmed to not include ray tracing, a rendering technique that can realistically simulate the lighting of a scene and its objects by rendering physically accurate reflections, largely known as one of the most performance-taxing features a video game can boast.

As stated by Ripple Effect Studio Technical Director Christian Buhl in an interview with ComicBook.com, Battlefield 6 will not feature ray tracing at launch, and the team has no immediate plans to add it anytime soon.

According to Buhl, this decision was made to prioritize performance and ensure the game is optimized to run on default settings for an average user. "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," the director commented.

It's worth pointing out that Buhl's wording only indicated that the developers don't plan to add ray tracing in the "near future," implying the feature could still arrive much later in the game's lifespan. However, with the team now stressing their focus on optimization on at least two separate occasions – and ray tracing remaining a performance-heavy technology – it seems likely that Battlefield 7 will arrive before ray tracing is even considered to be introduced to BF6.

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