Conclusion

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the latest installment in the popular first-person shooter franchise developed by Treyarch. Set against a backdrop of covert operations and shadowy organizations, it combines traditional shooting mechanics with innovative gameplay elements that challenge the established formula.

The gameplay experience in Black Ops 6 offers a mix of linear shooting missions alongside opportunities for stealth and strategy, echoing the spirit of its predecessor, Black Ops 2. Players engage in missions that allow for different approaches, whether charging in guns blazing or using stealth to eliminate foes quietly. The introduction of gadgets and a new movement system enhances the fluidity of combat, while a branching narrative invites players to explore various paths and decisions, although this can sometimes feel convoluted. I have to say I really like the single-player experience offered here. The game has the fast-paced combat action in an extremely polished action-movie-like environment that we know and love Call of Duty for. But there's also missions that focus on stealth with more dynamic and strategic gameplay. While the story is relatively simple once you look through it, the execution is fantastic, and I felt like being in a James Bond movie at times, or in a Tom Clancy Spy Novel. A few minutes later it felt like I was playing GTA, robbing a [spoiler removed] with my buddies. If you like this kind of single-player, definitely check out more reviews and videos.

Graphics
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 uses the Infinity Ward engine, also known as just "the IW engine," which traces its origins to the Quake engine developed by id Software over 20 years ago. While the engine has evolved significantly over the years, integrating advanced features like real-time lighting and dynamic destructible environments, the game does have a dated look.

Our screenshots show that a lot of effort has gone into creating the maps, which are well-crafted, with lots of different area types and good structure. I'm not a fan of flat floors, and we have a lot of those here. The artists have done a great job strategically placing light and shadows in the levels, to make them appear more realistic. You also get a good amount of reflections—all screen-space—which is perfectly sufficient, and comes with only a small performance cost. The cutscenes look excellent, especially the faces are of high quality. In actual game, the faces look alright, but fall far short of what we've seen in recent titles like Hellblade 2 or The Last of Us. While I can certainly appreciate that a lot of production value has been put into the indoors environments, these still feel quite bland, and objects in there lack geometric detail. Textures look considerably worse than what we've seen in the newest Unreal Engine games, but this is made up for by fantastic character movement animations that look extremely realistic.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
The game does compile shaders on startup for a minute or two, but you can jump right in and don't have to wait. Once that is complete, there is no more shader compilation, even when the game is restarted, until a GPU hardware change or driver update. Level loading is pretty fast, too, no complaints here either. While traversing some maps there's a tiny bit of stutter, for a split second, but never during firefights. I like that there are several difficulty settings and a large range of option to adjust motion blur, contrast, lower the risk of motion sickness, etc.

Effects & Upscalers
Black Ops 6 has support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, and there is also support for Frame Generation—very nice. It's one of the few titles that lets you enable FSR Frame Generation when NVIDIA DLSS Upscaling is used. This is especially important for owners for GeForce 30 cards and older, who don't have access to DLSS Frame Generation, which requires a GeForce 40 series graphics card. The default FOV was a little bit too narrow for me, but it can be fixed easily, I used a setting of 105°.

Hardware Requirements
Unlike most releases in 2024, Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is optimized very well. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, Extreme setting, without upscaling, you only need a RTX 3060, RX 6600, RX 5700 XT. Even Intel Arc A770 almost manages that goal with 59 FPS. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RX 7600, RTX 3070 or faster. 4K60? Not a problem, RTX 4070 Ti, RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and faster have you covered. Despite our use of game-ready drivers from all vendors, the game runs much better on AMD than on NVIDIA. Yup, you read right, AMD has the upper hand here, by a pretty big margin, actually. At 4K, the mighty RTX 4090 gets 102 FPS, the RX 7900 XTX is breathing down its neck with 89 FPS, beating the RTX 4080 Super by a pretty impressive 15 FPS. Even the RX 7900 XT is faster than RTX 4080 Super, and this continues across the whole stack—AMD is rocking the game. Now you probably wonder why you haven't heard about this before. Besides a subpar-crafted press release, AMD didn't mention this to anyone. If this were NVIDIA, they would have sent keys out to everyone who produces tech gaming content. Why not aim to get as much coverage as possible, especially for such a rare event where AMD has the upper hand by a big margin. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a larger outdoor area. Some areas, especially indoors, will run (much) higher FPS.

Settings Performance Scaling
The performance scaling of Black Ops 6 is very good. You can gain +60% FPS by switching from "Extreme" to "Minimal." This helps users with older hardware a lot, and the game still looks good, our comparison screenshots confirm. Most differences are with the shadows, textures and models, but the game is still extremely playable and entertaining. Good job Treyarch!

VRAM
Our VRAM testing shows that the newest Call of Duty is very well-behaved in terms of VRAM usage. Even at 4K you're barely hitting 12 GB; lowest settings runs at around 4 GB, so virtually all cards can handle the game without problems.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a thrilling return to form for the series, thanks to its engaging spy-thriller campaign, flexible missions, and AAA action-packed sequences. Highly recommended for fans of intense, story-driven first-person shooters. I haven't played the multiplayer though, it's not my thing, so I have no opinion on that.