A Major 'Battlefield 2042' Feature Is PC Exclusive, Sorry Console Gamers

It turns out that Battlefield 2042 will only support ray-tracing on PC, and even then, you’ll need one heck of a rig to achieve this glorious look for the anticipated game. 

After a stint of beta sessions in October, developer DICE had a bit of a bumpy ride from then to now. With matchmaking problems, fatiguing lag and a whole host of visual and gameplay glitches, the team explained that what the players experienced was from an older vertical slice of the game and that the majority of the reported issues were already ancient history. 

However, DICE did hear what the community had to say about communication, loadouts, movement and more and altered the game accordingly. It did take issue with the vitriol that the loud minority had for the work-in-progress, though. “Have you ever asked yourself why you don't have more devs interacting with players across the industry?" said producer Ben Walke, decrying the number of personal attacks on Battlefield 2042 employees. "There's a valid way to give feedback, I don't think anyone on the team is against receiving it when it's done in a constructive way.” 

Take a look at our compilation of stunning wins and stupefying fails from Battlefield 2042!

So, I don’t think I’m reaching when I say there’s likely to be another lot of vocal and annoyed console players that are missing out on ray-tracing in Battlefield 2042. There is a reason for this, though. Those 128 player matches actually place a significant strain on the CPUs of the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X so there isn’t the allowance to add ray-tracing or another visual tweak into the mix. 

It is “something to explore in post launch, potentially,” said one of the developers in a ResetEra thread, so all is not lost. With regard to the PC players, Nvidia announced that its own GeForce RTX GPU will “accelerate performance with the critically acclaimed NVIDIA DLSS, enhance image quality with ray-traced ambient occlusion, and optimize system latency with NVIDIA Reflex.” 

Of course, ray-traced ambient occlusion works perfectly on any other Microsoft DirectX ray tracing capable graphics card or laptop GPU, it’s just Nvidia singing the praises of its products here. Battlefield 2042 comes to PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One on November 19th.

Topics: Battlefield, Battlefield 2042, PC