Battlefield

After playing Battlefield 6′s open beta last month, I was impressed by how well it performed on console. And footage of the beta running on an Nvidia 1060 GPU, a nearly decade-old card at this point, further impressed me. So when I recently talked to some of the devs about BF6, I was curious how the team made it run so well, and they explained it was about not pushing consoles too hard and always optimizing during development.

During my video call with Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl, I asked if he felt like the current generation of consoles was tapped out and needed to be replaced or if they still had some performance to squeeze out of them. He told Kotaku that while he always feels like “there’s more room to improve performance,” he doesn’t expect devs to “double frame rates” in future PS5 and Xbox Series X/S games at this point. And with Battlefield 6, the studios working on it weren’t even trying to push these consoles to some theoretical breaking point. Instead, the goal was always to make an online FPS that ran very well.

“We also were intentionally not trying to push super hard on [PS5/Xbox Series X/S,]” said Buhl. “We didn’t want to push to the edge and fail. We wanted to make sure that we had an experience that we could optimize, that we could get to the point where it was going to run reliably at 60 frames per second, or, you know, over 80, whatever settings you preferred. And that was our focus, right? Like, get stuff in there, get it performant, and then add [more].” 

Buhl admitted that in the past, developers working on Battlefield games had a different approach. Often teams would “build a bunch of cool shit and then try to make it work.” This time around, that wasn’t the case, and Buhl told me that during development, Battlefield 6 had to “constantly be working; it had to constantly be performant.”

“Obviously, it’s not like we’re 100 percent hitting our targets throughout development. But every time we [dropped] too low, we put performance optimization efforts in place, paused work, [and said], ‘You can’t add stuff until we get this optimized,’” explained Buhl. “So that we could kind of make sure that at the end, we weren’t trying to do this giant lift of taking it from 30 frames to 60 frames, or something like that. We were taking it from, like, 55 to 60, right? And that’s a much more feasible effort.”

The ongoing debate around video game performance

Battlefield 6 on consoles does still use upscaling tech. Buhl confirmed to Kotaku that on PS5 and PS5 Pro the game uses PSSR. And on all consoles, FSR is available too. But it’s clear the devs were focused intently during development on shipping a game that ran well no matter where you played it, even if that meant cutting back visuals or effects.

The topic of video game optimization has become a hot one following the release of Borderlands 4 last week. Many claim the highly anticipated looter shooter is poorly optimized on PC and console, with players complaining about having to use low settings and DLSS to run the game on beefy rigs. For a point of comparison, BF6 is pretty playable on a 1060. Borderlands 4 is very much not. That card is below the minimum PC specs for both games.

In my experience on both PS5 and PC, Borderlands 4′s performance has definitely disappointed me. Especially on PS5, where some others and I have run into an issue where the game’s framerate drops lower and lower as you play longer and longer. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has pushed back on these criticisms, claiming the game is very well optimized for what it is and has suggested some players need to lower settings. And if you aren’t happy, you can just return the game and get your money back.

Battlefield 6 is out on October 10 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. EA told me the game will support 60FPS on all platforms, even Xbox Series S, and on some machines, like the PS5 Pro, the game can exceed that framerate.

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