Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 PC Performance Benchmarks, The FPS, Mason, What Do They Mean?

Here are our PC performance benchmarks for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, the latest FPS in the COD franchise with raytracing & several PC features. And if you are struggling to hit these frame rates, check out our guide on the best graphics cards for Call of Duty Black Ops 7.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 PC Performance Benchmarks Are Here: Now With Ray Tracing, and Many Upscaling & Graphics Options

Black Ops 7 is the latest installment in the Call of Duty: Black Ops series. It's mind-boggling that the Black Ops series itself has seen 7 installations so far, and that's outside of the Warfare series, which has a long history named to itself. The latest title comes with several modes, including a Campaign, Multiplayer, Zombies mode, and an updated Warzone experience. The game also includes a brand new four-player Co-Op campaign, first time in the series, and the new campaign really begs the question, if this is Call of Duty at all?

Regardless of what the game or franchise has become, it scored a solid 8.4 rating in our review for the campaign. You play in a dimension within your head where you battle enemies that include typical soldiers and also otherworldly beings. You fight bosses, sometimes massive in scale, and well, it's a totally different experience. For those who remember Call of Duty from its golden Modern Warfare 1/2 days, this will be a totally different experience.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 PC In-Game Settings

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is based on an upgraded version of the IW engine, called IW 9.0. This engine has been used by several COD titles from the beginning, from Call of Duty 2 all the way back in 2005, and has seen continuous improvements over the years. The engine was originally developed by Infinity Ward on the Id Tech 3 engine, the same engine that powered Doom 3. Id Tech itself has seen lots of improvements, with the latest version being Id Tech 8, which made its debut in Doom: The Dark Ages.

IW 8.0 is very advanced in terms of graphics, features, and the number of tuning options that are provided to gamers. The game has four different menus within the graphics settings: Display, Quality, View, and the ever-useful Benchmark.

First up, we have the Display options. The standard display options let you switch the Display Mode, select the Display Monitor, Display Adapter, set the screen refresh rate, display resolution, Aspect Ratio, Display Gamma, Gamma/Brightness, NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency, and also restart shaders pre-loading in case you are facing stutters even after the initial shader compilation run.

Right below the display settings, we can see the power saving settings, which allow users to enable "Efficiency" and "Low Power Consumption" modes. These presets modify the V-Sync for the Gameplay and Menu. The custom option allows you to tweak these, and you can also set a custom frame rate limit. Other options include reducing menu render resolution, pausing game rendering, reducing quality when inactive, and focused mode.

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Lastly, the game offers users to tweak the High Dynamic Range (HDR). This is set to Automatic by default, and you can also calibrate HDR to your liking.

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Next, we have the Quality menu, which lists various tweaking options. First are global quality settings, which give users the following presets: Extreme, Ultra, Balanced, Basic, Minimum, and Custom. You can also change the render resolution or use the dynamic resolution option.

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For upscaling/sharpening, the game supports all upscaling techniques such as NVIDIA DLAA, NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Image Scaling, AMD FSR 4, AMD FSR 3.1.5, AMD FSR 1, FidelityFX CAS, and Intel XeSS. Once enabled, you can select your upscaling quality preset, adjust the upscaling sharpness, and for NVIDIA's DLSS, you can also tweak the model to either CNN or Transformer mode. Right below this setting is the Frame-Generation option, which can be enabled with FSR 3, FSR 4, and DLSS. NVIDIA supports MFG, so you can set the frame-generation mode to 4x mode. Other options include VRAM Scale target and variable rate shading.

The most important of these settings is Ray Tracing Reflections, which is the single-most graphics-intensive setting in the game, as we will show in a bit. The game lets you set the RT Reflections to High or Low preset, or you can turn them off altogether.

Now, let's list down all of the Graphics Quality Settings available in the game:

• Texture Resolution
• Texture Filter Anisotropic
• Depth of Field
• Detail Quality
• Particle Resolution
• Bullet Impacts
• Persistent Effects
• Shader Quality
• On-Demand Texture Streaming
• Local Texture Streaming Quality
• In-Game Video Quality
• Shadow Quality
• Screen Space Shadows
• Occlusion and Screen Space Lighting
• Screen Space Reflections
• Static Reflection Quality
• Terrain Quality
• Volumetric Quality
• Deferred Physics Quality
• Weather Grid Volumes Quality
• Water Quality

With Display and Quality out of the way, we can now focus on the third menu, View. This lets users change the FOV and Camera settings. The FOV is set to 90 by default and can be increased up to 120. You can also adjust world and weapon motion blur from this menu.

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And last but not least, there's the benchmark menu, which uses a minute-long test to evaluate the game's performance based on your hardware and settings. Do note that you need to be in Multiplayer mode to run the benchmark, which is quite an odd thing to say, the least, but there are several oddities with the game itself, which we will talk about.

Our test setup featured an Intel Core i9-13900K running on an MSI MEG Z790 ACE motherboard with 32 GB of DDR5-7600 (CL36) memory. The drivers used are 581.80 for NVIDIA, 25.11.1 for AMD, & 32.0.101.8250 for Intel. These are the latest drivers from each camp, which should give us an idea of how well they are optimized for this particular title.

The Outer Worlds 2 PC Performance Benchmarks

Before we start the performance benchmarks, we first want to see how the game scales across its various quality presets. The game looks almost identical when selecting between Extreme, Ultra, and Balanced presets. Only the lower-tier Basic and Minimum presets are where you start seeing major visual impacts to overall graphics quality.

The ray tracing settings are the most intensive on GPUs. Switching between Extreme mode and Extreme mode with RT Reflections set to high yields a 2.8x difference in FPS, which is a lot. Even using the Low RT preset won't see a major performance difference as it is just as intensive.

Coming to performance, we first want to share the native results. At 4K without RT, you will get over 60 FPS easily with RTX 4060 Ti/5060 Ti and above GPUs. With RT enabled, none of the cards can manage a solid 60 FPS and require using upscaling techniques to get a playable 60+ FPS. AMD GPUs do really well here against their competitors, with the 9070 XT closing in on the RTX 5080 and the RX 9060 XT pushing ahead of the 5060 Ti 16 GB with a strong lead.

At 1440p, 60 FPS can be achieved on a wider list of cards. PCs with RTX 4060 and RX 9060 XT can manage 60+ FPS without RT enabled, while enabling RT requires above 5070-tier graphics cards.

And lastly, we have the 1080p results where 60+ FPS can be achieved on almost all graphics cards, such as the entry-tier RTX 5060 or Arc B580. RT 1080p with 60+ FPS is possible on RTX 5060 Ti, RX 9060 XT, and above GPUs.

Upscaling and Frame-Gen options are available in the game. The game works well with these, and we notice an 80% uplift with DLSS/FSR frame generation enabled, while MFG 4x modes enable over 250 FPS on the RTX 5090. This is great for enthusiasts running high-refresh-rate 4K OLED monitors. Budget PCs will enjoy 60-100 FPS with a nice mix of graphical settings on their PCs.

Following is the VRAM utilization in the game at each respective resolution:

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 PC Impressions

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is one of the most advanced versions of Call of Duty to date from a visual perspective. The game has lots of customization options for gamers, and you can expect a solid PC performance.

Some of the new features, such as RT, are very expensive and require capable hardware. Even then, you have to settle for upscaling and frame-gen to achieve a fast and playable experience. COD has always been about fast-paced FPS action with large set pieces. You'd really want to aim for 100+ FPS with high refresh rate monitors to really enjoy the game, especially if you're gonna play the Multiplayer or Warzone modes.

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While RT Reflections are intensive, we didn't see a noticeable visual difference with it was enabled. It looks great in some areas, but mostly, you won't be able to tell the difference, considering just how fast-paced the game is. But if you stand your ground and look at those minute differences, then RT Reflections are easy to spot. What makes the game even more interesting is that it is the first time Ray Regeneration has been enabled as part of AMD's Redstone update. This technology rivals NVIDIA's Ray Reconstruction.

Both denoisers have little to no penalty on performance and can be used to increase the visual fidelity by replacing the in-game denoiser with the AI model, which does a far better job at RT reconstruction. The best part is that gamers with Radeon RX 9000 series will be able to fully leverage FSR 4 with Ray Regeneration and Frame-Generation, offering superb performance.

The RX 9070 XT retains parity with RTX 5080 on higher resolutions and beats it at 1440p and 1080p. The RX 9060 XT also offers great performance against the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB. Kudos to AMD on their driver optimization for the RX 9000 series in this particular title.

While the game looks and runs decently enough, my problem stems from the way Black Ops 7's campaign has been designed. You might have already heard about how you can hear your Co-op teammates speak even during cutscenes, and then you have the online-only nature of the campaign with no checkpoints & the no-activity timeout.

I believe these don't have a place in a campaign, even if it is Co-op. The team at Treyarch should have designed a single-player-only component around the campaign. It looks like some of the backlash might be addressed in a future update. As for the campaign, well, it doesn't feel like COD in many sections. So yeah, if you're a multiplayer or warzone guy, then Black Ops 7 is fine, but if you're playing it for the campaign, if you treat this as a non-COD game, then it should be fine.

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