Battlefield 6 BETA is here, not only is the BETA seemingly appeasing the hardcore fan base (including us) but its also breaking significant records such as the highest concurrent player count on steam. Once upon a time Call of Duty was the title that has the most concurrent steam player base with just over 491,000, BF6 achieved north of 521,000. Not only is that a huge number but it blows other popular titles like GTA V (enhanced edition) out of the water which had a peak player base of "just" 187,000 but this is for a unreleased BETA version of the game!
Steam DB stats when BF6 passed COD
Whilst the above numbers are impressive, the main focus of BF6 is that is refreshingly a call back to the days of BF3 & BF4 rather than super troops from the likes of BF1, BFV and of course BF2042. Its what fans wanted and it looks like Battlefield Studios have listened and is no doubt the reason for its popularity.
1 - SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Published steam recommended requirements
We are pretty good at translating game system requirements and whilst BF6, like most titles, publish system requirements for older hardware it does give us a fairly good indication when translating to modern hardware. With the minimum system requirements requiring an Intel i5 8400/Ryzen 5 2600 along with a RTX 2060/Radeon 5600 it means that pretty much any hardware released in the last 7 years stands a good chance of running BF6. But, we are not interested in the minimum system requirements, most people are eyeing up those recommended system requirements so that the game can be run on top settings and higher resolutions as Battlefield Studios intended.
A Intel i7 10700/AMD Ryzen 3700X or higher is recommended here, again, this is out of date hardware which you shouldn’t be finding for sale anywhere in today’s market but we can take both processors passmark score of 16,156 and 22,452 to calculate a modern equivalent. Taking the incredibly good value for money modern AMD Ryzen 5 4500, which is essentially to go to budget CPU in today's market, its passmark score comes out at 16,081 which is pretty much the same score as a i7 10700.
Battlefield Studios highlight a Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti & AMD Radeon RX 6700-XT as the recommended GPU here, again, you wont find or shouldn't find one for sale in today’s market as both cards are now approaching an age of 5 years which may as well be 1000 years when it comes to graphics card technology but nabbing the RTX 3060 Ti passmark score of 20,334 we can see where it sits compared to modern cards. A modern Nvidia RTX 5060 8GB (non Ti) scores 20,697 making it a very close equivalent.
If you are on a budget then an AMD Ryzen 5 4500 paired with a Nvidia RTX 5060 8GB will pretty much get you in that recommended system requirement realm however just be aware, you are only just within that requirement and its always best to be above simply for future updates and the safety net that brings.
A few other things of note that are published for the system requirements, Windows 11 is the recommended system requirement, we can tell you that it made practically no difference in our testing with both Windows 10 & 11 so ignore that but with Windows 10 coming to an end in October, you should be on Windows 11 or close to being on 11 by now anyway.
16GB of RAM is the recommended amount here, speeds are not published but again in our modern world 3200Mhz is more than enough, faster RAM will make little to no difference and bumping up to 32GB also yields little improvement but the cost to go from 16GB to 32GB is a worthy consideration for any system anyway.
Apparently TPM 2.0 needs enabling in your BIOS, it doesn't, we tested it but that's not to say it maybe a requirement in the full release. UEFI Secure boot however is a must so make sure your system is compatible with this requirement.
One final note, BF6 also appears to not have real time ray tracing implemented which was a big song and dance with previous versions, as a fan it appeared to hamper previous title launches resulting is poor performance and a ultimately not a smooth launch. You would think this is a bit of a face palm but the lighting as well as the rest of the visual fidelity in BF6 BETA is second to none and Battlefield Studios have done an amazing job without "RTX on". We may see it in the future, but honestly, it's not needed.
2 - OUR BENCHMARKS
As always, we have personally followed the Battlefield series since 1942, yes some of us are indeed that old! In 2011, 2 years after UKGC formed we brought you a special edition BF3 system recommended for the ultimate BF3 experience and continued to do so with concurrent titles. Battlefield 6 is no different and with our extensive BETA test plays we are delighted to now bring you our Battlefield 6 Gaming PC in the form of our Enforcer:
| Case | Corsair 3500X ARGB Black |
|---|---|
| Power Supply | Corsair CX650 650W |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 7 5700X |
| Processor Cooler | Arctic Freezer 36 Black |
| Motherboard | Asus PRIME B550-Plus |
| RAM | 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200MHz |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia GeForce® RTX 5060 Ti 16GB |
| Hard Drive | 1TB Kingston NV3 M.2 NVME SSD |
| Sound Card | 7.1 Surround Sound Audio |
| Networking | Gigabit Ethernet |
| Front Ports | 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x Audio |
| Rear Ports | 2 x USB 2.0, 4 x USB 3.0, 3 x Audio, 1 x PS2 |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 10 & 11 Compatible |
| Warranty | Standard 6 Year Warranty |
This is a system that exceeds the official system requirements which caters to users wanting to experience Battlefield 6 how it should be played even at proper 1440P & 4K resolutions whilst at the same time finding a good balance of hardware that still represents good value for your money. Remember that official recommended i7 10700 CPU with a passmark score of 16,156, well the Enforcers AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU has a passmark score of 26,613! It doesn't stop there, the recommended Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti 8GB with a passmark score of 20,334 is replaced with the modern Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16GB which has a passmark score of 22,863. Whilst its only a ~10% performance bump the key here is the 16GB of VRAM capable of offering the required performance for higher 1440P & 4K resolutions which would struggle on 8GB.
| Map | 1080p | 1440p | 4k |
| Siege of Cairo | 104 | 101 | 82 |
| Liberation Peak | 138 | 132 | 82 |
| Empire State | 140 | 132 | 82 |
We could draw you a pretty graph but we like simple information and the data is clear to see. Above is real world BETA testing playing online in its current state, the Enforcer smashes it out of the park at not only 1080P resolution but at 1440P & 4K too. These are great numbers for a brand new AAA title, a testament to how good the game engine is behind BF6, so often we see AAA titles land only for you to need £2000+ of hardware just to run it to a decent standard and even then you may need to ramp up the "fake frames" settings. A game that runs north of 60FPS at 4K on midish range hardware is practically unheard of today. Bravo!
One thing of note from our benchamarks is BF6 seems to be quite a CPU intensive title, normally games are GPU intensive with hardware focus largely put on the GPU however there is clearly a lot of work for a CPU here and its no surprise given the detailed effects of a tank going up in flames or half a building crumbling to the ground. That officially recommended Intel i7 10700 CPU or modern equivalent will have a noticeable impact on your frame rate and we would be very hesitant to steer our customers in the direction of the official recommended requirements to obtain decent results. Of course things may change come the official launch but from what we gather, the BETA is 95% there and we do not expect any significant changes when it comes to the launch. Not all is lost for those running hardware that is on the cusp or below where you should be, Battlefield Studios have made tweaking your settings very easy and we really like the way they have implemented this system in game;
Showing how each setting effects your CPU, GPU & VRAM individually allows you to fine tune anything to squeeze those extra FPS from your system.
We are also particularly impressed with the built in game performance overlay tool (GRAPHICS > ADVANCED > PERFORMANCE OVERLAY):
It looks pretty simple and too many it maybe a little confusing, there is a reason why MSI afterburner and other tools are popular but we particularly like the two red areas we have highlighted, these represent both CPU & GPU time to complete a frame - in the above example the CPU is taking 11.4ms to complete a frame whilst the GPU is taking 6.1ms to complete a frame which nicely explains in real time that here the CPU is causing a bottleneck and therefore you can tweak CPU related settings or upgrade your CPU to improve performance. The goal here is to achieve a resolution and frame rate you are happy with and this little overlay helps explain things very easily to the user.