The Battlefield 6 developer team focused really hard on making the game run as smoothly as possible, especially on hardware that is less-than-stellar by today’s standards. One console in particular caused a lot of headache, but they still managed to make it work.
Playing the Battlefield 6 open beta, I truly started appreciating EA, because it was the first time in a long time that a AAA studio had a well-performing, smooth, and optimized game. And, what’s more, it was just the beta, with months of testing and development time left in the tank. It ran equally well on my RX 9070 XT and my friend’s 3070, despite the seeming disparity between these two pieces of hardware, which truly drives the optimization point home.
However, that didn’t come easy, and the BF6 dev team really gave it their all to ensure their upcoming title worked as smoothly as possible on a wide range of machines. Speaking with Kotaku, the team behind BF6 commented on how they struggled to make the game perform on the Xbox Series S, a lower-end console from 2020, which has caused trouble for players and devs alike in the past (by no fault of its own, given its capabilities).
The Series S “limited memory” proved a “challenge” for the devs, who noted a lot of crashing while testing the game on it, which led them to pour more time and effort into memory efficiency and optimization, with results that went beyond getting the Series S to run the game better. According to technical director Christian Buhl, optimizing memory for the Series S led to the “whole game [being] better and more stable.”
Specific performance optimizations were made just for the Series S, which Buhl affirms now runs the game at a “smooth 60 fps,” which is more than any (console) gamer would want. As I’ve noted above, the whole game runs well on a wide array of machines and was clearly optimized for mid- to low-end hardware, which is exactly what every big game should target to avoid getting into the kind of situations Monster Hunter Wilds and Borderlands 4 found themselves in.
Bad performance in AAA games has become somewhat of a meme at this point. Whether it’s game-breaking bugs or the game simply refusing to run, the AAA industry has become recognized for massive budgets that apparently don’t account for quality assurance or optimization, which makes EA’s effort that much more appreciated.
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