Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 marks the return of developers Treyarch and Raven, a project four years in the making since Black Ops Cold War. In that time, there’s been a technical upheaval of sorts. Firstly, Black Ops 6 moves to the IW9 engine, away from Treyarch’s own custom engine. This aligns the game’s technology with the most recent portfolio of Call of Duty titles and most crucially, the upcoming Warzone component. Using IW9, we’ll soon see the gameplay systems in Black Ops 6’s campaign roll out to its battle royale mode as well, including the so-called omni-movement that lets players sprint and dive in all directions.
For this piece though, the focus is on the state of single-player on every console, including last-generation hardware. Black Ops 6’s campaign is one of the series’ most adventurous in years: we get branching dialogue trees, large free-roaming sandbox levels, and even stealthy, Hitman-style missions which you’re free to tackle in several ways. We saw flickers of these freedoms in Cold War, and even last year’s Modern Warfare 3 in part, but here, they’re greatly expanded out, and it pairs nicely with Black Ops’ bombastic tone. The question is, can 11-year-old consoles handle it?
Current-gen consoles are mostly fine, as you would expect. With IW9 at the core, we’re in familiar territory to Modern Warfare 3. Both PS5 and Series X operate at a 3840×2160 resolution target that dynamically adjusts down to 1920×2160 – in effect, adjusting on the horizontal axis gives both PS5 and Series X enough GPU headroom to tackle Black Ops 6’s most explosive missions at 60 frames per second or close to it. That said, the visual standard for the game is ambitious and within the at-times entertaining, varied mission design, there are rough spots. Up close, there are low resolution textures, blocky shadows, and even a complete absence of shadows from major light sources like explosions. It’s also a disappointment to find ray tracing support is absent this time around after its successful execution in Cold War back in 2020.
On the frame-rate front – looking at 60Hz support first – both PS5 and Series X enjoy a tight 60fps a majority of the time, though there are still issues. You’ll notice checkpoint hitches during play: a cluster of dropped frames that always precedes an auto-save. These stutters affect every console to some extent, and while they’re far worse on last-gen consoles, they do occasionally interrupt gameplay. The second point relates to actual sub-60fps drops in action, which are thankfully few and far between. Again, PS5 and Series X are typically solid, but it is possible to trigger a drop to 50fps on each by triggering explosives. Also, in line with previous Call of Duty titles, Series X tends to drop more regularly in the campaign. In matching shootouts through the market of mission two, for example, there are small lurches into the high 50s on Series X, which are mostly cleared up on PS5. It’s a small detail, and trivial if you have a VRR display, but it does make for a marginally smoother playthrough on PS5 overall.
Jumping to Xbox Series S, the turnout is far less convincing at 60fps. From the opening mission in Kuwait, right on through to the open-ended Iraq stage, it’s a more variable 50-60fps range with tearing at the top of the display. At the very lowest, the most extreme points see performance drop into the 40s. Practically speaking, in battle there’s no way to ignore the drops, and VRR is the only way to salvage a smooth experience. In terms of resolution, Series S sticks to a similar target as in Modern Warfare 3: a 1440p target, with drops to 1280×1440 – halving the horizontal axis again. There are signs of the vertical axis being affected too in rare cases, but despite that, there’s simply not enough flexibility in the resolution targets to hold at 60fps. The upside is that visual settings are broadly intact from the PS5 and Series X renditions of the game – but it is a shame to see Series S falling so short of a tight 60fps here, bearing in mind it is the series’ hallmark.
Switching over to the 120Hz mode on each console next, it’s fascinating to see the peaks and troughs of each machine’s performance revealed with no 60fps cap. The resolution setup is the same as 60Hz and all core visual settings are identical too. However, PS5 and Series X run the gamut from as high as 120fps, with sharp drops down to the 60fps line. It’s highly variable, but most battles do tend to stabilise within the 70-100fps range as you’d expect, coupled with tearing at the top of the display. Really, only those with VRR supporting displays will benefit, but it’s a neat option to have. The reading is too variable for non VRR displays, where settling for a flat 60fps line may give a more perceptual smooth result. There’s also little to split PS5 and Series X frame-rates in matching comparisons, though Series S clearly falls short by comparison. We’re looking at a deficit of 15-30fps on Series S overall, and again with potential to go below the 60fps line.
So, if Series S is having some challenges, where does that leave the last generation consoles? Is it still possible to enjoy a decent experience when the developers are pulling out all of the stops? Well, obviously, there are cutbacks. Looking at PS4 up against PS5, the older console targets a native 1080p, with dynamic adjustments taking it to 960×1080 based on GPU load. Other key settings are dropped: most environmental textures are of a lower resolution, as is skin shader quality on character faces. Shadows also take a hit, with a more dithered, noisy appearance in close-ups. In fact, as an extreme measure to hit 60fps on PS4, shadow casting from NPCs is disabled at times as well. Screen space reflections are disabled too, meaning varnished floors and water bodies now rely on static cube maps. And finally, in the open-ended Iraq mission, terrain and shadows visibly pop in – much more so than current-gen machines. All of these limits apply to every last-gen console, from base Xbox One, to PS4 Pro, and Xbox One X. In more contained, linear stages the campaign holds up reasonably well but the pop-in, the LOD transitions on terrain, and especially the slow loading textures, are a huge drawback on all four systems.
Performance is also variable. From the very first steps of the Kuwait opener, PS4 lurches between 45-60fps. There are stretches at 60fps – often low-key stealth segments or driving between areas. However, for Call of Duty’s signature combat, each level progressively puts more demands on the 11-year-old system. The marketplace shootout, for one, has us between 40-60fps with screen tearing in tow, and we get a similar range for any open world combat. Sadly, this is coupled with hitches, again related to the game’s checkpoint save system – but they hang for much longer on PS4 with its slower HDD write speeds. Even worse, PS4 suffers from major streaming issues at points, notably on the Hunting Season mission, where moving between segments of the map triggers a spell of stuttering motion. In short: the mixture of GPU drops, checkpoint hitches and traversal stutters makes PS4’s campaign one to avoid this year.
Looking at PS4 Pro next, the good news is that much of this is improved. In terms of resolution there is a target 1512p, with a drop on the horizontal axis as with other machines. Potentially checkerboard rendering is in assistance here as well. Alas, the checkpoint hitches remain on PS4 Pro – frustratingly – but the typical frame-rate in action holds to 60fps much better across the board. There are exceptions like the shootout through the market, taking us down into the 50s at points, and likewise while planting C4 during the open-field missions. Also, interestingly, PS4 Pro is the only console that engages v-sync, meaning no screen-tearing. Of the quartet of last-gen machines, PS4 Pro is the best of a bad bunch in this sense; it’s by no means perfect, and fluctuates between 50-60fps with heavy combat, but it’s capable of a tighter 60fps experience than most.
Comparatively speaking, Xbox One X runs worse overall. It uses the same 1512p target but gameplay often ends up running at a lower frame rate on average than PS4 Pro. Also, in Xbox One X’s case, this is coupled with more frequent traversal stutters as well on top of the checkpoint stutters. These range from small blips, to almost an entire second of dropped frames – a huge distraction for any open-field driving.
As usual, Xbox One sticks to a 900p target and as you’d expect, pushes the very worst performance of all seven consoles. No surprises here: we’re talking about a constant 40-45fps reading from the first mission, with drops to the mid-20s possible in cutscenes. There’s a morbid curiosity in seeing how Xbox One fares, and it’s doubtful anyone will expect much better from vintage 2013 technology that was already outclassed by the competition at launch.
Overall, Black Ops 6’s last-gen performance makes it clear where the developer’s priorities are – certainly for the campaign – where it’s increasingly hard to recommend last-gen consoles as a valid access point. The takeaway is that Call of Duty’s campaign offerings are discouragingly poor on last-gen at this point — perhaps excluding the PS4 Pro. Black ops 6 is available on Game Pass if you’re hanging on for dear life to your Xbox One or One X, and fancy giving it a go. But it’s a pale shadow of the developer’s intended experience and for that the campaign is so much better enjoyed on PS5 and Xbox Series machines. But that said, Black Ops 6 is clearly demanding on the latest consoles and some might say that the idea they’re able to run at all on 11-year-old hardware is borderline miraculous.