(Image credit: Fully Buffered on YouTube)

Battlefield 6 launched a month ago on console and PC to rave reviews, becoming a commercial hit. While the community has expressed anything but positive feedback for the FPS, one area where BF6 wasn’t the most well-received was its implementation of the Javelin anti-cheat, which requires TPM and Secure Boot... or so we thought. In a new video by Fully Buffered, Battlefield 6 is shown running on an almost ancient FX-9590 CPU from AMD’s Bulldozer era, over a decade ago, which doesn’t support TPM.

Battlefield 6 on AMD FX... - YouTube

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Now, the FX-9590 is not *that *old; it launched back in 2013 as the flagship offering from the FX-9000 series. It had 8 cores that consumed up to 220W, serving as the antithesis to Intel’s single-threaded performance focus. By modern standards, the FX-9590 is outdated, but more importantly, it comes from an era where SecureBoot and TPM — essentials for modern anti-cheat software — were very new concepts.

(Image credit: Fully Buffered on YouTube)

When paired with an RX 5700 GPU and 16 GB of DDR3 1833MHz RAM, at 1080p, the game ran in the “mid 30s, sometimes up to 40s,” but there was noticeable input lag and the CPU was clearly struggling with animations in a large, sprawling arena. It’s a testament to the game’s optimization that it runs smoothly on decade-old hardware — something most modern blockbusters can’t do even on current-gen systems — and it’s a reminder of how things should actually be by default.

While in-game, Task Manager showed 100% CPU utilization while the GPU was only sitting at around 25%, and at one point in the video, you can see the RX 5700’s fans stop spinning to indicate just how severely bottlenecked this setup was. Switching to a smaller map with fewer players does alleviate most of the input lag and boosts the framerate a bit, netting you 40+ FPS on 1024x786 resolution.

(Image credit: Fully Buffered on YouTube)

Going from Fullscreen mode to a Windowed mode didn’t result in any performance improvements, but Fully Buffered said he was still impressed that the game was even playable on an FX-9590. More importantly, Battlefield 6 ran on hardware that doesn’t have TPM support, confirming that it’s only SecureBoot that actually matters for its anti-cheat, a sentiment echoed by other commenters on Reddit who corroborated that TPM is not a hard-and-fast rule for the military shooter

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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.