Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War System Requirements Revealed

[btarunr]

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[the54thvoid]

250GB.

Holy moly. That's plain ridiculous. Pushes me toward requiring s new SSD.

 

[kayjay010101]

250GB?! Give me a break..

Also strange that they say a 1080 is interchangeable with the 3070.. Isn't the 3070 like twice as powerful?

 

[xman2007]

I just want the single player campaign, 175gb/250gb looks like I'll be passing on this one as well, they've well and truly killed the cod franchise in favour of mp and battle royale crap, such a shame, there have been some really good campaigns over the years. Oh well rip crap of duty.

 

[Vya Domus]

Why does the "ultra rtx" need 250GB and the rest 175GB ?

 

[Sherif5]

I5 2500k or Ryzen 5 1600x? Are you kidding me?

 

[Deleted member 24505]

250gb games are getting ridiculous, it'll be one ssd per game soon

 

[Dristun]

Why does the "ultra rtx" need 250GB and the rest 175GB ?

Probably a separate pack of textures with properties required for RT (reflectivity, etc.) baked in.

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.

 

[Erazor6000]

RTX 3070 is twice the performance of the GTX 1080 on average.
These specs are quite weird.

 

[Al Chafai]

RTX 3070 is twice the performance of the GTX 1080 on average.
These specs are quite weird.

the GTX 1080 is built on an old architecture and has limited DX12 support compared to Turing or Ampere GPUs
i have a pascal card and it falls behind compared to it's competition when playing DX12/Vulkan games

 

[TheDeeGee]

Fortnite recently reduced it's size from 105GB to 29GB

 

[SerPiolo]

Why on earth on requirements specs intel and nvidia are always before amd? Even when amd is actually better in some situation?

 

[SIGSEGV]

"Recommended with raytracing,"

LOL. I prefer playing solitaire or tetris rather than this game.

 

[ZoneDymo]

I5 2500k or Ryzen 5 1600x? Are you kidding me?

Maybe its highly Multi-threaded?

 

[swirl09]

What a bizarre breakdown :s With each field either giving no indication of what the target is, or just a vague one, this just makes it pointless. At least Ubisoft bothers to state what the preset is, the resolution, and the frame rate target (even if its a joke that enthusiast is set to 4K30 lol). At least it gives you some idea!

250gb games are getting ridiculous, it'll be one ssd per game soon

Thats 1 game per SSD for some already ^_^'

 

[X71200]

I just want the single player campaign, 175gb/250gb looks like I'll be passing on this one as well, they've well and truly killed the cod franchise in favour of mp and battle royale crap, such a shame, there have been some really good campaigns over the years. Oh well rip crap of duty.

And you will get it, by paying $60 to download some rest 200gb of crap.

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.

 

[BSim500]

250GB. LOL. Games devs need to learn to optimise better. "But it's expected that newer games would take up more space" is true up to a point, but if you still marvel at how good even modded Skyrim Legendary Edition (2011) looks with install sizes peaking at barely 1/10th of the size of these CoD absurdities, then the way it's spiralling into exponential demands for depreciating gains is getting silly. Even Prey (2017) only took up 18GB (once foreign languages were removed). Extending this 18GB (2017) -> 250GB (2020) 14x growth ratio every 3 years for AAA games into the future, Call of Duty 2023 should end up requiring 3.5TB, Call of Duty 2026 requiring 49TB, and Call of Duty 2029 requiring 686TB install size unless they start getting a grip of reality...

 

[rtwjunkie]

Why on earth on requirements specs intel and nvidia are always before amd? Even when amd is actually better in some situation?

I can see you are focusing on the really important things....

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.

 

[efikkan]

I5 2500k or Ryzen 5 1600x? Are you kidding me?

Don't put too much thought into the specifics here.
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.

 

[Cheeseball]

It's good that they put a list of "Competitive" specs. I can somewhat agree that a GTX 1080 can still do high FPS with a mix of medium to low settings. If it can be done in MW4/Warzone, then it can be done with BLOPS5.

 

[moob]

Fortnite recently reduced it's size from 105GB to 29GB

Destiny 2 is gonna be shrinking the install size with Beyond Light as well. Going from about 95GB to around 59GB-71GB. Granted, they're vaulting a bunch of content (though I'm not sure how much that has to do with it), but still, at least some devs are looking to reduce disk usage. 250GB is more than a quarter of my SSD. No thanks. I had played every CoD on PC until Modern Warfare (usually wait for sales), but even with the smaller 175GB that's asking a lot.

 

[ObiFrost]

I5 2500k or Ryzen 5 1600x? Are you kidding me?

Yeah and 670 as 1050 tier card vs ~1060 = 1650 or that 970 vs 1660 Super, whom latter is superior over 970. These specs make absolutely no sense...

 

[$ReaPeR$]

What a joke.. cod has been dead for the last decade.

 

[X71200]

Not really, MW blew up especially with the free Warzone. Its current situation is bad enough that I don't play it, on the other hand.

 

[pixiedustdumpster]

Why are people complaining about the size...a 1TB nvme costs 100usd you poor fucks