Each year whenever Call of Duty is released traditionally we publish a nice VGA graphics performance review. This year I am delaying that article until there are better drivers / game patches available. For 6 hours straight I have been trying to retrieve reliable FPS numbers from the game, but as it stands it is a bit of a mess.

Framerates fly up and down per mission / scene and are all over the place. Sometimes 30 FPS, and the next second 60 FPS. Sometimes measuring 1902x1080 and 2560x1440 will retrieve the very same FPS (while VSYNC is off), and next to that the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 executable often crashes during start-up of the game. Selecting the AA modes does not have a performance impact whatsoever, which makes me wonder if they actually work as configured.

At this moment we feel that no article that will be published on Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 could be reliable enough, other then outting number that are not representative and reliable enough.

The game is not bad when is works, much like the colleagues from TPU also noticed at 8GB RAM memory systems you will get full RAM utilization as if the game is caching to the max. We did not get many stutters though. With our 16GB system things definitely felt and ran a notch better. From a graphics point of view the game digs DEEPLY into your framerate when you open up all graphics quality settings, it will have an adverse effect on game performance. The problem however remains, the game looks good ... but remains to be just that -- nothing excels in PC graphics quality to a level that amazes.

Given the problems we ran into at this point I made the decision to delay the performance review until there are better drivers and likely a game-patch or two have passed. When it works the game does run smooth enough on pretty much any modern age graphics card. However at this point in time, there's no way we can objectively measure game performance to something you guys can relate and match your results to.

Below a couple of screen-shots I took.