Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War Performance Analysis

While I will complain even more in a little while, it really pissed me off that this game has no master profiles to choose from. Everything is granular, so you have to change it all by hand. Activision included no catch-all low, medium, high and ultra profiles. However, I set the vast array of options to high or equivalent myself and ran the game at three resolutions. As you can see, it scales really well actually. 1080p offered up 122 FPS, and despite being twice the pixel count and four times the pixel count, moving up to 1440p and 4K, the rendering cost was clearly not double and quadruple.

The cost of ray tracing is enormous on this game. What’s more, it comes with three options to adjust from medium, high and ultra. These are Ray Tracing Sun Shadows, Ray Tracing Local Shadows, and Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion and turning on ANY of the three has about the same impact as using all three. So, I saw turn them all on. The visual difference between each level isn’t huge, but that can vary from scene to scene. However, the visual improvement from having it off to having it on can be pretty huge.

4K Ray Tracing

1440p Ray Tracing

1080p Ray Tracing

DLSS technology renders the game at a lower resolution, then upscales to your target resolution. It does this using knowledge from an neural net AI that has been trained on this game to do a better job and honestly… it’s freaking witchcraft. DLSS gets better with every update and the results speak for themselves. Ultra Performance is meant for 8K, but honestly, it looked alright. However, it’s best to start with DLSS Performance and work your way up to balanced or quality if you have enough rendering budget left. As you can see, it allowed me to use High graphics Ultra Ray Tracing, and Quality DLSS at hit 64 FPS… nice!

4K Ultra Ray Tracing + DLSS

1440p Ultra Ray Tracing + DLSS