Performance woes on PC are common, though apparently not in Battlefield 6—per our own esteemed hardware team, this is not a game you need a supercomputer to run. As a matter of fact, you may well be fine with your current kit.
That, as stated in a recent Eurogamer interview, is entirely the point. Technical director Christian Buhl says that a “meaningful percentage” of players during the beta were running the game on minimum specs—or below. And while other AAA games struggle to deliver on solid performance on powerful machines, BF6 is trying to make sure min-spec actually means min-spec.
“Min spec is certainly one of our most important specs,” says Buhl, “it’s super important from both a commercial and business perspective—we want as many people as possible playing the game.
“We did a lot of analysis, we did tests on the game on a wide range of hardware above and below our minimum and recommended specs. We figured out what we can hit, what we need to hit from a business perspective, and that was to capture a wide audience on PC. It’s been super critical.”
It’s telling, in our age of somewhat-shoddy PC ports, that a game should actually run well on the specs put forward by the developer. That’s not to say it’s entirely on these teams’ shoulders, mind—industry pressures can lead to gnarly deadlines and games shipped before they’re ready, and it’s not like optimizing for a functionally infinite combination of hardware setups is a cakewalk.
In fact, it was pretty hard work. Earlier in the interview, Buhl remarks: “We built maps, and had to go to our artists and tech artists to adjust these maps so they were more performant. We’ve put in a lot of effort across the board to make sure these performance targets were set, and whether you’re on min spec or ultra spec you’re going to get the experience we’re targeting.”
While you’ll need to saddle up with a 4080 or similar to get the game running at its shiniest, EA’s been aiming for players with six-year old graphics cards to be able to blow up helicopters at an acceptable amount of frames. And as someone whose bank account is simply allergic to having a high-end PC, I’m grateful major studios are starting to take notice of us mere mortals, even skipping out on the obligatory ray-tracing, too. Even if EA was the last place I would’ve expected that energy to come from.
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