Introduction

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 takes players back into the heart of covert warfare, delivering an intense and immersive experience set in a near-future world fraught with chaos. The story centers around a new elite task force, led by a seasoned operative who uncovers a global conspiracy threatening world stability. As players traverse diverse locations and historic time eras—from war-torn cities to high-tech military installations—they engage in gripping missions that demand strategic thinking and teamwork.

The game enhances its predecessor's legacy with a more diverse mission structure and increased focus on stealth gameplay mechanics. You also have more gadgets at your disposal and there are some elements of character development and progression.



Developed by Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 continues the use of the IW Engine (Infinity Ward Engine), which has been significantly upgraded over the years, incorporating advanced features for graphics, physics, and AI to enhance the overall gaming experience. While there is no support for ray tracing, you get to pick from a big list of upscalers: DLSS with DLAA support, FSR 1, FSR 3, NVIDIA Image Scaling, FidelityFX CAS and Intel XeSS—all the options are present. Frame generation is supported too, both FSR 3 and DLSS 3.

This review will evaluate the performance of Call of Duty Black Ops 6 across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the Extreme settings profile, with all upscalers disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• You can choose between "fullscreen," "borderless," "windowed" and "fullscreen extended window," which uses all the area of a multi-monitor system
• The "sustainability" section lets you adjust an FPS limiter and V-Sync, for in-game and in-menu separately
• V-Sync can be disabled completely, there is no hidden FPS cap

• The presets available are "Extreme," "Ultra," "Balanced," "Basic," and "Minimum." Minimum sets render resolution to 50%, all the others keep it at 100%.
• Dynamic Resolution can be enabled to dynamically adjust the rendering resolution, with a target range for 30 to 300 FPS
• The upscalers available are "Off," "FSR 1.0," "FSR 3.0," "DLSS," "DLAA," "NVIDIA Image Scaling," "FidelityFX CAS," and "XeSS"
• While you can adjust sharpening for NVIDIA upscalers, there's no such option for FSR
• Frame Generation can be enabled independent of upscaling, so you can use DLSS upscaling with FSR frame generation on pre-GeForce 40 cards
• "VRAM Scale Target" lets you set a predefined amount of memory that's the maximum that CoD can use, based on the graphics card's total memory. This can come in handy when you have other applications using GPU memory while gaming.
• "On-Demand Texture Streaming" downloads textures from the Internet. There is no option to turn it off, the only choice is "Minimal"
• Additionally, there's a long list of settings that help you balance rendering performance with quality

• The third settings screen lets you adjust the Field of View. The default of 90° was a bit too narrow for me and I changed it to 105°
• Motion blur can be disabled completely
• You may also adjust how much the camera moves while you walk/stand still—great to avoid motion sickness