The last time graphics technology really knocked my socks off was the advent of DLSS, Nvidia's supersampling tech that lets you boost performance by rendering games at lower resolutions and upscaling them in real time.
DLSS, and to a lesser extent AMD's FSR, still feel like a magic trick, but it's not without sacrifice: Despite years of version upgrades and AI bolstering, upscaling can still produce muddy shadows, ghosting artifacts, and introduce noticeable latency in many games. Increasingly, big-budget games are not treating upscaling as an option, but an expectation in system requirements. Battlefield 6 is a notable exception.
"We want Battlefield 6 to run great without [DLSS], and we want to give you the option to use it if you want," Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl told PC Gamer in an interview. "I believe all of our default performance targets are not with [upscaling] on.
"There are pros and cons to a lot of those different technologies … Our goal is for everything to be performant without a lot of extra stuff."
That's in keeping with Battlefield Studios' stated mission of optimizing Battlefield 6 for a comfortable range of PC hardware and consoles at launch, something that the Battlefield series, with its huge scale and dynamic destruction, is not known for. And it's not just talk: Performance, if still imperfect in spots, was a big win for Battlefield 6 coming out of the August beta.
"For open beta, we set our targets for performance and stability just barely lower than where we wanted to be for launch. I was super happy to hear people positively received the stability and performance of the game," Buhl said.
Surprisingly, Battlefield 6's system requirements (seen below) are modest for a 2025 game, recommending the five-year-old RTX 3060Ti to hit 60 fps. That's about what my increasingly mediocre 2080 Super machine accomplished without upscaling, but I found it still felt snappy with DLSS on. The requirements have barely increased from what Battlefield 2042 called for in 2021.
You can see its relative graphical modesty on screen: Battlefield 6 looked great in the beta, but it's not as photoreal as other major studio games that demand gluttonous VRAM and enforce always-on raytracing. Performance comes first, and for an FPS, that's exactly what I like to hear.
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570
4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
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