When every frame per second counts, poor settings choices can ruin your gaming experience. And in Battlefield 6, two fine tunings are causing performance to plummet, even on recent machines. Fortunately, Digital Foundry’s analysis has just provided a clear solution to this problem.
Launched on October 10, 2025 on PC and consoles, Battlefield 6 is based on the Frostbite engine and offers impressive graphics. But on PC, this level of detail comes at a price: players must juggle around twenty settings to hope to obtain a good quality/FPS ratio. And among all these cursors, just two are enough to cause a sudden drop in performance if you don’t adjust them.
Shadows and dynamic lighting, discreet enemies of your FPS
In a recently published video, Digital Foundry demonstrates that the two most demanding parameters are the quality of solar shadows (Sun Shadow Quality) and the combined option SSAO & GI (Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination).
These two effects aim to improve the rendering of light and shadows on the settings and characters. But according to the tests carried out, performance may drop from 5 to 14 FPS depending on the configuration of your PC, for a barely perceptible visual gain.
Digital Foundry therefore recommends the following settings:
- For Sun Shadow Quality : “High” if you have a RTX 3070 or betterotherwise “Average”
- For SSAO & GI : “SSGI Low” on high-end GPUs, or “GTAO Low” for more modest configurations
These adjustments allow to instantly recover between 11 and 22 FPSdepending on the scenes and lighting conditions, without distorting the appearance of the game. A considerable gain, especially for players who want to stabilize their framerate above 60 or 120 Hz.
What you lose visually… and what you really gain
Reducing shadow quality or ambient occlusion doesn’t mean playing an ugly game. The difference is often invisible in combat, especially in movement. Digital Foundry underlines this in its video: even without ray tracing, shadows and lighting are among the most expensive effects in the gamewithout being the most spectacular to the naked eye.
It is for this reason that the PS5 version of the game already uses very low settings by defaultwhich does not prevent the result from being impressive. A GTAO Low configuration certainly offers slightly less soft shadows, but releases up to 14 frames per seconda compromise difficult to refuse on a mid-range machine.
By enabling just these two changes, users can see an instant improvement in fluidity. And for those who apply all the optimizations proposed in the videothe total gain can increase up to +72% performancedepending on the scenes and environments.