Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was released on PCs on October 25, 2024 and the title became "the biggest Call of Duty release ever" within a week.
AMD reached out a few days ago and offered us to have a look at the performance of the game and how it plays out on the company's hardware. That is because Black Ops 6 has been optimized for AMD Ryzen and Radeon and the combination alongside Smart Access Memory (SAM) is said to deliver up to 9% more performance. In its community blog post, it said:
AMD has worked directly with Activision on optimizing performance for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on AMD Ryzen™ CPUs and Radeon™ RX GPUs to deliver a fantastic experience. When pairing Ryzen™ and Radeon™ together, experience up to 9% more performance on averageiii when using AMD Smart Access Memory™ technology in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
While we did not test the claims about SAM, we certainly had a look at how good of a job AMD has done in terms of optimizing the title. We compared the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and pitted it against Nvidia's RTX 4080 SUPER. We do know that the vanilla 4080 or the 4070 Ti SUPER is more comparable price-wise to XTX but that's the hardware we had on our hand and thought it was close enough anyway.
The testing was done on Steve's machine, which has a Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 64 GB of DDR5-6000 CL 30 memory.
Instead of doing the typical 16:9 testing, we went for the monitor's native resolution of 5120 x 1440 (32:9 aspect ratio). We thought it would be interesting to note how good the game looks on (super) ultrawide and how well AMD and Nvidia stack up. 5120 x 1440 is also pretty close to 4K (3840 x 2160) and hence users can expect close to similar performance at 4K too.
Also, since this is a GPU test, bumping the settings up makes sense and it is primarily the opposite of how to test CPUs.
Right off the bat, it is easy to see that AMD has done a great job perfecting the performance of the title for its hardware. We tested using the optimized drivers for both AMD and Nvidia with driver WHQL driver versions 24.10.1 and 566.03 respectively. Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.2033 (KB5044280) was chosen since it is the latest Patch Tuesday update available at the time of testing.
The 7900 XTX managed an average of 116 fps in the built-in benchmark tool based on the Lowtown map (Please note that we crashed a few times while loading the benchmark tool). The 5% low or the 95th %-ile of the card was 96 fps and this was coincidentally the same average the 4080 Super managed.
Even the 1% low on the XTX was above 90 and this means users looking to enjoy a high refresh rate, high-resolution experience will not have to worry about poor performance in trying to achieve such visual fidelity.
So, if we do some quick math the 7900 XTX was ~21% faster than the 4080 SUPER in averages. And the high frames don't mean the game does not look decent though as you can check out in the attached gallery at the bottom of the article.
If you are wondering, FCAS refers to FidelityFX CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) and NIS is Nvidia Image Sharpening. These were turned on by default and we did not disable them since these were selected by the game. While it isn't an exact apples-to-apples comparison, the image difference was hardly noticeable and even with these settings disabled we saw near identical output from both cards.
At the request of AMD, we also checked FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) 3 performance and unfortunately, it appears that upscaling is broken at the moment. There was actually a very noticeable performance regression here.
We reached out to AMD regarding this and the company expects the problem to be resolved soon with a future update once frame generation and upscaling is integrated properly in the game. The spokesperson said:
.. COD has not added the frame gen portion of FSR 3.1 to the game yet, its coming soon!
Remember, AMD allowed for the frame generation to be decoupled from the upscaling – as of right now FSR 3.1 is only providing upscaling and not improving frame rates, we are hoping the update comes in the next couple of weeks.
It wasn't just lowered frame output though. The amount of memory being used by the game with FSR was also not working correctly it seems. We generally do three runs for our game tests but once we noticed that the VRAM usage was all over the place, we decided to do two more runs.
In three out of the five runs, the 7900 XTX used around 20 GB of VRAM and in two other runs it was around 16 GB. This was not the memory requested or allocated but the dedicated VRAM usage that is supposedly actually used by the game and a 20~25% difference of reported usages is most certainly a bug too. Thus we decided to drop the FSR results from our VRAM data as it was showing inconsistent usage.
Unlike our 7800 XT review, which showcased a clear advantage for the AMD card in terms of VRAM headroom, Black Ops 6 isn't such a scenario. That is because both of the cards are gobbling up around 83 to 84% of the available buffer.
It is also a relief for both cards that the title does not feature ray tracing as it is known to be something that requires plenty of VRAM.
Where the 7900 XTX does shine is the price-to-performance. The GPU is available nowadays for around $800-900 which is around $200 less than the 4080 SUPER's price. Thus you are getting a lot more performance at a much lower price.
So if you are looking to buy a graphics card specifically to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, we can wholeheartedly recommend the AMD GPU or any other Radeon card compared to the corresponding GeForce counterparts since the performance differential will scale down the lineups.
Gallery: Black Ops 6 amd vs nvidia perf
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