This is an interesting turn of events from DICE and Electronic Arts, as this franchise was previously a pioneer of ray tracing (RT).

If you played the Battlefield 6 beta recently, you probably noticed the absence of RT in the graphics settings. Comicbook.com interviewed Christian Buhl, the technical director at Ripple Effect (formerly DICE LA), a team primarily focused on Portal mode. Buhl confirmed that RT was not accidentally omitted and that this visual option is unlikely to be added to the game in the near future.

“No, we are not going to have ray tracing when the game launches, nor do we have any plans for it in the near future. That’s because we wanted to focus on performance. We wanted to ensure that all our efforts were dedicated to optimizing the game for the default settings and users. So, relatively early on, we made the decision that we just weren’t going to do ray tracing. Again, it was mostly so that we could focus on performance for everyone else,” Buhl said.

This seems like a step backwards, considering Battlefield V was one of the first PC games to support RT in 2018, especially for reflections. Three years later, the underwhelming Battlefield 2042 included ray-traced environmental occlusion. Still, Buhl is right that a competitive multiplayer shooter should prioritize performance. Players clearly valued this decision, as the Battlefield 6 beta broke records (previously reported in the news). On Nvidia graphics cards, performance can be boosted with DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Multi Frame Generation. AMD users can enable FSR 3 with FSR Frame Generation, while Intel users can turn on Intel XeSS with XeSS Frame Generation.

Battlefield 6 is set to launch on October 10 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.

Source: WCCFTech, Comicbook.com