Battlefield 6 Devs Ditch Ray Tracing, Choose "Actually Playable Framerates" Instead

In a refreshing display of common sense, the team behind the next Battlefield has decided that a stable frame rate is more important than pretty puddles.

If you were one of the people hoping to see your own terrified face reflected in a puddle just before a skyscraper collapses on you in Battlefield 6, I've got some bad news. In an exclusive chat with ComicBook.com, a key developer has confirmed that the game will ship without any ray tracing features, and there are no plans to patch it in later. And the reason? In a shocking twist for the modern AAA industry, they decided to focus on making sure the game actually runs well for everyone.

The news shouldn't come as a total surprise to anyone who played the recent beta. While eagle-eyed PC players found some references to ray tracing in the command console, the feature was conspicuously absent from the actual settings menu. Now we know it wasn't just missing from the beta; it was cut from the game entirely, and frankly, it's probably for the best.

Performance Over Prettiness

Christian Buhl, the Studio Technical Director at Ripple Effect, laid out the team's logic in no uncertain terms. "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," Buhl stated. "That was because we wanted to focus on performance... 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".

Let's translate that from careful developer-speak: for a chaotic, 128-player shooter with fully destructible environments, a smooth, high frame rate is infinitely more important than perfectly rendered shadows. This is a decision made for the actual players, the people who value a responsive experience over a pretty screenshot. It's a pragmatic choice that prioritizes the core of what makes Battlefield great.

A Pattern of Practicality

This "function over flash" philosophy seems to be a running theme for the Battlefield 6 team. It mirrors the same practical, if controversial, logic they used when addressing the game's Secure Boot requirements to combat cheaters, a move that prioritized competitive integrity over absolute user convenience. They seem intent on building a solid, playable game first and worrying about the bells and whistles later, if at all.

A Bummer for the Campaign Crowd?

Of course, not everyone will be thrilled. While multiplayer junkies who turn all their settings to low for a competitive edge will likely applaud this decision, it might be a letdown for players more interested in the cinematic single-player campaign. The campaign is typically where you can afford to sacrifice frames for fidelity, and the lack of a top-tier graphical feature like ray tracing might make the experience feel less "next-gen" to some. But let's be real, the heart and soul of Battlefield is its massive multiplayer offering, and that's clearly where the studio's priorities are.

In an industry obsessed with chasing the latest graphical buzzwords, often to the detriment of launch-day stability, it's refreshing to see a major studio make a choice for the players, not the marketing slides. The game already looks fantastic, and if skipping ray tracing is the price we have to pay for a smooth experience on October 10th, it's a bargain