Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War Performance Analysis

Optimisation

The problem with this game has to be the lack of overall graphics profiles. It auto sets what it thinks will work best, and then gives you around 200 variables to choose from. A lot of the terms will likely be lost on new PC gamers and those who don’t care too much on the knowledge of how graphics cards operate. Fortunately, the options do give a description of what each feature does, and a little warning if turning it up will heavily impact your performance. I do wish the provided images showed the changes as you make them, like Ghost Recon does.

I did a stupidly large run of benchmarks for this, and honestly, threw most of them away as the results were so minor.

Field of View has a moderate impact on performance, but surprisingly, special effects quality, screen space reflections and view distance all had fairly minor impacts or differences between low, medium and high. Ultra saw a 2-6 FPS drop if they’re all enabled though.

What really matters with this game is VRAM. Keep that usage bar under the red line or you will see stuttering. You can use the render resolution and shadow quality settings to have the biggest effect on those. However, I found sticking with high settings and leaving other shadow features on to have fairly minimal impact on performance, but again, watch your VRAM levels. If you have a LOT more VRAM spare, get the texture quality up to Ultra sn download the higher resolution asset pack too, as it does look a lot sharper.

The medium profiles for everything seems to do pretty much the same as high, and ultra seems to do the same as high but cost more FPS, so treat this game as if it has three options; off, low and high, ignore medium and ultra.

Ray Tracing

I’ve seen people only enable Ray Tracing Sun Shadows and leave the other two off. However, I honestly think if you’re going to RT, set all three to high and make the difference up with DLSS or rendering resolution. Then if you’ve got a bit of performance to spare, turning them up to ultra, but honestly, the visual difference is not huge.

DLSS

This magic tool is great if you have an RTX card. Quality and Performance modes certainly netted the best results for me, and while they gave me great FPS gains while using ray tracing, you can still use it without ray tracing for picking up your FPS in general.

Don’t be tempted to set the game to ultra on everything and then make it up with DLSS though, you really are better off getting the performance right first, which is why I firmly feel setting things to “high” in this game gives the best balance.

If you don’t have DLSS on your GPU, you can set the rendering resolution to about 80% of your desktop resolution. Open up GeForce Experience of Radeon and apply some sharpening and you get a broadly similar, if a little less refined result.

Final Thoughts

The granular range of graphics options on this game did seem impressive, but largely, I found much of them to be useless. There’s too many levels for each setting with virtually no change between some profiles. There are no master profiles that change all the settings, and it can be a little bewildering. You’ll spend ages tinkering with minor or pointless changes only to find the last few options make such a drastic difference that you’ve wasted too much time on the little details.

Fortunately, rendering resolution, texture quality, shadows, and deciding if you want to turn on RT or DLSS is all you’ll need. Now… I need to finish my CyberPunk 2077 benchmarks!