Friday, October 30th 2020
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War System Requirements Revealed
The system requirements lists of "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War" were released, covering a broad range of gaming segments, from competitive online play, to recommended AAA campaign playthrough, and even maxed out gameplay with RTX-on. "Black Ops: Cold War" appears to be optimized for an equally diverse set of use cases. There are three disk space requirement levels. For 50 GB you get only the multiplayer component with e-Sports content. For 175 GB, you get the multiplayer component and the single-player campaign. For 250 GB, you get these two, plus additional high-resolution content. Among the use-cases are "minimum," "recommended," "recommended with raytracing," "competitive," and "Ultra RTX."
For starters, there's the absolute bare minimum, which calls for a mid-range 4th Gen Intel "Haswell" or AMD FX "Vishera" processor; along with 8 GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 670 or Radeon HD 7850 graphics (circa 2012), and either 50 GB or 175 GB, depending on what you want to install. The "recommended" tier is for the game with medium-level eye-candy. It calls for a Core i5-2500K or Ryzen 5 1600X processor, 12 GB of RAM, and GTX 970 or GTX 1660 SUPER from the NVIDIA camp; or R9 390 or RX 580 from the AMD camp. "Recommended with raytracing," is essentially minimum requirements for raytraced content. You'll need at least a Core i7-8700K or Ryzen 7 1800X processor, 16 GB of RAM, and at least RTX 3070 graphics (if you can find one).
"Competitive" is an interesting tier, targeted at e-sports gamers who couldn't bother with eye-candy, and just want a high refresh-rate experience for online multiplayer. Here, you'll need at least an i7-8700K or 1800X processor, 16 GB of RAM, and graphics options that include the GTX 1080 "Pascal" or RX Vega 64. The current-gen equivalents of these cards would be RTX 2060 or RX 5600 XT. At the very top is the "Ultra RTX" list, which is meant for PC enthusiasts to reap the most possible eye-candy from their high-end gaming PC builds. Here you'll need either a Core i9-9900K or Ryzen 7 3700X, 16 GB of RAM, and at least an RTX 3080.
For starters, there's the absolute bare minimum, which calls for a mid-range 4th Gen Intel "Haswell" or AMD FX "Vishera" processor; along with 8 GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 670 or Radeon HD 7850 graphics (circa 2012), and either 50 GB or 175 GB, depending on what you want to install. The "recommended" tier is for the game with medium-level eye-candy. It calls for a Core i5-2500K or Ryzen 5 1600X processor, 12 GB of RAM, and GTX 970 or GTX 1660 SUPER from the NVIDIA camp; or R9 390 or RX 580 from the AMD camp. "Recommended with raytracing," is essentially minimum requirements for raytraced content. You'll need at least a Core i7-8700K or Ryzen 7 1800X processor, 16 GB of RAM, and at least RTX 3070 graphics (if you can find one).
29 Comments on Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War System Requirements Revealed
Holy moly. That's plain ridiculous. Pushes me toward requiring s new SSD.
Also strange that they say a 1080 is interchangeable with the 3070.. Isn't the 3070 like twice as powerful?
Well, the size is kinda surprising to be honest, as the beta looked palpably worse than MW2019. Then again, people underestimate that this is, like, 4 games in one: the Campaign, none of the levels in which are reused for standard Multiplayer, and then there's Zombies and Warzone too.
These specs are quite weird.
i have a pascal card and it falls behind compared to it's competition when playing DX12/Vulkan games
MW was good up until they botched it to the sky with streamer girl skins and campers galore, this game is selling just over the hype MW built, and it's actually based on the previous Black Ops engine. It looks worse and plays worse. The multiplayer maps are 3 way repetitive BS layouts.
The answer is simple: Marketshare and name recognition. Almost every person recognizes the name Intel. AMD, despite killing it the last few years with Ryzen series, still is not there on name recognition among average person. So it’s easier to list requirements that people will immediately be able to relate to.
These recommendations are usually based on the test systems used during development, and does not necessarily reflect which precise AMD/Intel/Nvidia product which reaches a specific performance level.