This mad lad got Battlefield 6 to run on a 12-year-old AMD CPU, circumventing its stated anti-cheat requirements

Despite some recent unrest within the community, Battlefield 6 is mostly a home run for the venerable military shooter series—thanks in part to its pristine optimization. It boasts a low barrier to entry due to non-prohibitive system requirements, and those requirements are so low fans have been putting it through the wringer to see just how old a GPU can run it.

More recently, YouTuber Fully Buffered (via Tom's Hardware) got the game to run on an AMD FX-9590 CPU, first released in 2013, revealing that the game's stated minimum required specs are a bit misleading.

Fully Buffered broke down his process in the above video, where he shows the game running on the 12-year-old chip to a quality standard he calls "not terrible." It peaks at around mid-40 FPS at lower resolutions, though input lag kneecaps the feasibility of playing this way for very long.

The poor GPU, an RX 5700, is shown hovering around 30% utilization in Task Manager, its potency shown a hard ceiling by the comparatively ancient processor. Regardless, it's remarkable that it runs at all—and not just because of the severe bottleneck.

As the video highlights, Battlefield 6 requires Trusted Platform Module 2.0—a feature that only became standard after the 9590's heyday⁠—and UEFI Secure Boot enabled for EA's proprietary kernel-level anti-cheat, Javelin. At least, that's what the system requirements say; when Fully Buffered launched the game with the FX CPU (which did have Secure Boot but not TPM enabled), he was able to play the game as normal.

The game's not-terrible FPS in the video is a testament to its consistent performance, though anyone trying to actually enjoy BF6 on an AMD FX chip will have a rough go of it. Still, it's surprising that the famously persnickety Javelin anti-cheat's TPM requirement is so pliable.