Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the latest installment in Activision’s popular first-person shooter franchise. Now owned by Microsoft, and consequently available to Game Pass subscribers from day 1, this year has had many firsts for the industry. Black Ops 6 doesn’t look much different from Modern Warfare 3 (our guide) but performs worse. This is our optimization guide for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 recommending the best settings for PC players.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
Enable Resizable BAR.
Turn on Game Mode.
Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
Black Ops 6: Resolution, Upscaling & Frame Generation
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 scales well across resolutions, averaging 90 FPS at 1080p, 72 FPS at 1440p, and a very playable 64.5 FPS at 4K using the maximum quality settings. These numbers were obtained at the native resolutions without upscaling or frame generation.
Test Setup
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti FE.
Motherboard: MSI MPG B650 Edge WiFi.
Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Black Ops 6 features all noteworthy upscalers, including DLSS, FSR, and XeSS. NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.7 upscaler delivered the best quality, while FSR 3 and XeSS 1.3 were nowhere as effective. Enabling the former’s “Ultra Performance” mode causes the game to freeze, something we’ve never seen before.
DLAA is nearly -30% slower than native 4K, and even enabling frame generation doesn’t make it much faster.
The quality preset is 20% faster, while balanced grants a 25% uplift.
The performance preset yields a 42% increase, followed by the ultra-performance mode which is 83% faster than native.
FSR 3 “Fluid Motion Frames” frame generation can be paired with DLSS, XeSS, or FSR for a hefty performance boost. We obtained an average of 102 FPS to 160 FPS upon pairing frame generation with upscaling presets. Be sure to enable reflex if you’re using frame generation.
Black Ops 6: Graphics Presets
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 features five predefined graphics presets. The performance ranges from 82 FPS at “Extreme” to 100 FPS at “Ultra,” 114 FPS at “Balanced,” and 120 FPS at the “Minimum” quality preset.
These numbers indicate that the second-highest quality preset offers the ideal blend of quality and performance, granting a ~20% FPS bump over “Extreme.”
Texture Filtering, LOD & Particle Resolution
Texture Filtering is a staple in modern gaming, sampling perpendicular mipmaps for sharper and clearer textures. The performance hit is around 5% at the highest quality (Ultra or AF 16x), but it can be set to “Normal” or AF 4x for slightly higher framerates.
Texture Filtering Comparisons
Detail Quality sets the LOD or mesh complexity of the terrain, vegetation, and other 3D objects onscreen. Luckily, it has a negligible impact on performance.
Detail Quality Comparisons
Particle Quality can significantly impact performance during firefights or explosive encounters. It sets the resolution of particle effects like smoke, embers, dust particles, etc. It profoundly affects lighting by blocking luminant sources and casting additional shadows.
The highest quality setting can reduce 1% lows by more than 15%.
This is due to dynamic particle lighting where each particle impacts the scene, illuminating objects and casting shadows.
Normal substantially reduces particle lighting and particle density.
Low further reduces particle lighting quality.
Very Low disables most embers in addition to reducing particle lighting.
Persistent Effects enable different visual effects cast by fire and explosions near the surface. It subtly impacts performance but can tank the lows (~15%) during intensive sequences.
PE Off vs On
Local Texture Streaming Quality sets the LOD of distant textures, replacing them with low-resolution mipmaps at “Low.” It grants a healthy performance gain without notably affecting quality.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 leverages local and on-demand textures. The former is loaded from the local storage, while the latter is downloaded in real-time. If you’re running low on storage space or have a slow internet, you may want to set it to “Minimal” which downloads only the basic assets.
Conversely, setting it to optimized and increasing the texture cache allocation (up to 64 GB) can improve visual quality by downloading high-quality textures in real time.
Shader Quality Comparisons
Shader Quality is a performance-intensive setting that controls how light impacts different surfaces. In most cases, it lightens or darkens surfaces, washing out the area’s existing shadows and lighting.
It cuts performance by over 20% at the highest quality.
Medium disables contact shadows and reduces ambient occlusion quality.
Low disables soft shadows, further reducing occlusion coverage.
Scaling down shader quality also reduces global illumination intensity
Shadows & Reflection Quality
Depending on your setting, shadow quality can have a mild to modest impact on performance. The “Very Low,” “Low,” and “Normal” options perform the same. However, “Ultra” is 10% while “High” is 6% slower than them:
It also sets the number of objects casting shadows. Small-scale shadows are disabled at the lowest quality.
Volumetric Shadows are enabled at higher quality options, darkening shadowed surfaces.
Shadow Quality Comparisons
Screen Space Shadows produce ambient shadows, often along edges and corners, and supplement standard shadows with refined borders. They decrease the average FPS by 4-5% and are best left at “Low.”
SS Shadows Compared (Low disables distant shadows)
Black Ops 6 features four different technologies for calculating the ambient lighting. These are GTAO (Low), GTSO (Medium), MDAO (High), and Global Illumination (Ultra):
Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion or GTAO, similar to HBAO+, upgrades SSAO with a horizon-based approach but is supposed to be faster.
Ground Truth Specular Occlusion or GTSO, adds specular occlusion to the algorithm without affecting performance.
MDAO is a more aggressive technique that produces larger shadows and darkens prebaked shadows.
The highest quality setting employs some form of global illumination. It looks very similar to MDAO but avoids excessive shading like the former.
Ambient Occlusion Comparisons
Ambient Occlusion is a key aspect of in-game lighting. It adds self-contained shadows along edges, crevices, and corners. It reduces framerates by 4-5% and is best left at the medium-quality preset.
Screen Space Reflections are used to cast dynamic reflections on glossy and semi-glossy objects by re-rendering visible objects at a lower resolution. It moderately impacts performance, decreasing the FPS by 4-5%.
Screen Space Reflections Compared (High increases reflection range)
Static Reflections generally refer to pre-baked reflections (usually cube-maps). These are rendered from memory and mildly impact performance. However, in Black Ops 6, we noticed a drop of less than 3% in the average FPS.
Tessellation, Volumetrics & Water Quality
Tessellation increases mesh detail (polygon count), usually ground or terrain. This is achieved by subdividing relatively coarse object meshes on a primitive level, to produce finer results. Its impact on quality and performance tends to be subtle.
Tesselation Quality Comparisons
Volumetrics Quality sets the resolution of light shafts, fog, clouds, etc. It reduces performance by 3-4% in most scenes. Interestingly, going below high also disables certain shadows like the one on the dead soldier’s clothing. For most PCs, the highest or second-highest option should work fine.
Volumetric Quality Comparisons
Water Quality enables caustics and wetness effects caused when water comes into contact with a surface. There aren’t many scenarios where you’ll come in contact with water bodies in Black Ops 6, hence you can leave it at the highest quality setting.
Field of View Scaling
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has a 90-degree FOV by default. This can be reduced to 60 or increased to 120. Interestingly, the performance tends to improve at higher and deteriorate at lower values.
Deferred Physics sets the terrain quality or water body deformation during explosions and other destructive sequences. If you’re facing drops during such scenes, consider reducing it to the lowest.
Black Ops 6: VRAM Usage & Texture Quality
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 uses over 11 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Extreme.” Reducing the graphics to “Ultra” brings the VRAM consumption to 9 GB, while “Balanced” and “Basic” use 6.2 GB and 5.22 GB, respectively.
Texture Quality Comparisons
The VRAM usage doesn’t change much with resolution. We observed an average graphics memory consumption of over 10 GB at 1080p and 1440p with the “Extreme” quality graphics preset.
Black Ops 6: CPU Bottlenecks
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is predominantly GPU-bound, even on midrange PCs. We recorded an average GPU-Busy deviation of 8% at 1080p, twice the value observed at 1440p. 4K is completely GPU-bound.
1080p Max
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Performance Summary
The most taxing graphics settings include “Shader Quality,” “Local Texture Streaming,” and “Particle Resolution.” High-resolution screenshots can be viewed on this G-Drive link.
Best Settings for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 PC
Optimized Settings
High-end
Midrange
Low-end PC
Resolution
4K (3840×2160)
1440p (2560×1440)
1080p (1920×1080)
Target FPS
200 FPS
200 FPS
144 FPS
Upscaling
DLSS or FSR Balanced|Performance
DLSS or FSR Balanced
DLSS or FSR Balanced
Frame Generation
On|Off
On
On
VRAM Scale Target
90%
90%
90%
Texture Resolution
High
High
High
Texture Filtering
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
DOF
Off
Off
Off
Detail Quality
High
High
High
Particle Resolution
High
Normal
Normal
Bullet Impacts
On
On
On
Persistent Effects
On
On
On
Shader Quality
Medium
Medium
Low
OD Texture Streaming
Optimized
Optimized
Optimized
Local Texture Streaming Quality
Low
Low
Low
Shadow Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Screen Space Shadows
High
High
High
Occlusion+
High
High
High
Screen Space Reflections
High
Normal
Off
Static Reflection Quality
Low
Low
Low
Tessellation
High
High
High
Volumetric Quality
High
High
High
Deferred Physics Quality
High
High
High
Weather Grid Volumes Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Water Quality
All
All
All
CPU
Core i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Core i5-13600K/Ryzen 5 7600X
Core i5-12400/ AMD Ryzen 5 3600
GPU
RTX 4080/RX 7900 XT
RTX 4070/RX 7800 XT
RTX 3060/RTX 3060 Ti/RX 6600
Memory
32GB (dual-channel)
16GB (dual-channel)
Less than: 16GB (dual-channel)
High-end
Midrange
Low-end PC
Optimized Settings
RTX 4090
RTX 4080
RTX 4070 Ti
RTX 4070 Super
RTX 4070|RTX 3080 Ti
Resolution
4K|1440p
4K|1440p
1440p
1440p
1440p
Target FPS
180 FPS|240 FPS
144 FPS|>200 FPS
165 FPS
144 FPS
120 FPS
Upscaling
DLSS Performance
DLSS Performance
DLSS Performance
DLSS Performance
DLSS Performance
Frame Generation
–
–
–
–
–
VRAM Scale Target
90%
90%
90%
90%
90%
Texture Resolution
High
High
High
High
High
Texture Filtering
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
DOF
Off
Off
Off
Off
Off
Detail Quality
High
High
High
High
High
Particle Resolution
High
High|Normal
Normal
Normal
Normal
Bullet Impacts
On
On
On
On
On
Persistent Effects
On
On
On
On
On
Shader Quality
Medium
Medium
Medium
Medium
Medium
OD Texture Streaming
Optimized
Optimized
Optimized
Optimized
Optimized
Local Texture Streaming Quality
Low
Low
Low
Low
Low
Shadow Quality
Ultra
Ultra|Normal
Normal
Normal
Normal
Screen Space Shadows
High
High|Off
Off
Off
Off
Occlusion+
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Screen Space Reflections
High
High|Off
Off
Off
Off
Static Reflection Quality
High
High
High
High
High
Tessellation
High
High
High
High
High
Volumetric Quality
High
High
High
High
High
Deferred Physics Quality
High
High
High
High
High
Weather Grid Volumes Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Water Quality
All
All
All
All
All
Black Ops 6 Settings for Low-end PC: RTX 3060/RTX 4060/RX 6600
We’ve got optimized settings for budget hardware, including the RTX 3060 or RX 6600. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 easily produces an average of over 100 FPS at 1080p without frame generation and a whopping 160 FPS with frame generation on the RTX 3060. All you need to do is tweak a few settings. More on that here.
Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Find me at HardwareTimes and PC Opset.
