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.