When we played the Battlefield 6 beta on Xbox Series X|S, we deemed it "an Xbox showpiece" with its impressive visuals and rock solid frame rates - and it seems that the game's lack of ray tracing is partly why performance is very stable in the upcoming EA title.
Speaking with ComicBook, Battlefield 6 developer Christian Buhl gave the team's reasoning why there's no ray tracing at launch, and the team has no current plans to add it after launch either. In short, it comes down to catering for a wide range of PC setups, enabling better performance on lower-end hardware.
"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,
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."
While it seems that PC was the main focus when it came to dropping RT features, we still think this is a net positive for Xbox as well. The game still looks great on Series X with some fantastic visuals to boot, and we know that Series S has struggled with RT support in the past. For an online shooter focusing on fluidity, we don't think ray tracing is needed!
Anyway, while last month's beta seemed pretty well optimised across different systems, we'll have to wait and see how the full game fares - especially taking into account the cinematic story campaign. Battlefield 6 launches in full on October 10th; not long to go now, folks!