Battlefield 6's beta proved more successful than publisher Electronic Arts could have ever hoped for, peaking at over 521,000 concurrent players on Steam during the beta's first weekend.
According to the development team—a group of EA-owned studios collectively known as Battlefield Studios—a "meaningful percentage" of the players who played the open beta did so on low-end hardware, with some even playing on rigs below the game's minimum specs.
Predicting this, Battlefield Studios has been focused on optimising the game for low-end hardware for quite some time, at the expense of some high-end graphical features like ray tracing.
In an interview with ComicBook, Ripple Effect's technical director Christian Buhl expanded upon this decision, explaining that ray tracing has been sacrificed for performance.
"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 says. "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 optimised as possible for the default settings and the default users. So, we just made the decision relatively early on that...
