Watch: We tested Battlefield 6’s micro stutter and smooth performance

Battlefield 6 has almost arrived and it’s already getting a lot of love from online shooter fans. The series has a reputation for smooth gameplay, so how is the latest entry faring? That’s the question Will Smith is answering in the latest PCWorld video, benchmarking its micro stutter (or possibly lack thereof?) on an ideal hardware setup. And as Will has explained before, this is a key metric in how smooth a game feels.

Will’s test PC is running an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, so it’s just about the best hardware you can reasonably expect in the current PC gaming landscape. What we’re looking for isn’t necessarily high frame rates but smoothness. So what we don’t want to see is big spikes in the frame rendering time, which normally oscillate between 5 and 12 milliseconds. And most of the standard campaign gameplay doesn’t really have any of it, though some of the showpiece scripted sections (such as the beach landing) can hit it hard with effects like smoke.

Some Battlefield veterans might be a lot more concerned with multiplayer performance, where Will turned off a lot of the bells and whistles like super-high resolution, DLSS, ray tracing, etc. There are more variables in the frame time due to the general chaos of multiplayer and a lot of extra processing that goes on in a multiplayer game.

But even in multiplayer, the render time was only a little more chaotic, with possible spikes coming from loading shaders. Even with tons of player characters on the screen, Battlefield 6 seems to be remarkably stable. It looks like the developers have also turned off some of the more performance-hitting effects in the multiplayer mode.

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