Call of Duty: Black Ops III PC graphics performance benchmark review - Article - Guide - Review

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 grapics performance

Yeah, it is time for the once in a year opportunity and yearly cash-cow from Activision and the treyarch studios, the latest iteration of Call of Duty Black Ops 3 has been released. Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a military science fiction first-person shooter video game, developed by Treyarch and published by Activision.It is the twelfth (yep you read that well - 12^th) iteration of the Call of Duty series and the sequel to the 2012 video game Call of Duty: Black Ops II. It is released on several platforms, ours .. Microsoft Windows and then PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. For this article we take out a dozen or so graphics cards and benchmark thr game. We have a look at DX11 performance with the newest graphics cards and technologies. This article will cover benchmarks in the sense of average framerates, qwe'll look at all popular resolutions scaling from Full HD (1920x1080/1200), WHQD (2560x1440 and of course that big-whopper of a resolution Ultra HD. UHDTV (2160p) is 3840 pixels wide by 2160 pixels tall (8.29 megapixels), which is four times as many pixels as 1920x1080 (2.07 megapixels). 

Black Ops III will be a popular title and is looking OK from a graphics point of view. The release of Call of Duty remains a little weird for the PC as it is only 64-bit, and thus that requires a 64-bit operating system- this in fact eliminates a number of customers. A second requirement for the game is that you need to have at least 6 GB of memory. If you have 3 or 4 GB installed, the game will not start-up, but for previous releases patches inevitably did fix this and 4 GB at one point was allowed. The game engine itself is fairly equal to the its predecessor and with all tricks and bells enabled, it does look okay if your graphics card can manage it of course. COD however always is tricky to benchmark as the results are and always will be a little unreliable. One test run will result on 40 FPS, the second 36 FPS and another 33 FPS. Then another factor is a need to be taken into account as well, some levels average out at say 40 FPS, yet there are a handful of scenes (with helicopters and such) where the frame rate will crumble down. Now 80% of the game plays with good playable framerates, but a handful of levels will just stall any graphics card whatsoever.  

Important note:

This morning For the 6 hours straight I had 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.

The game is not bad when is works, 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 opposed to what it reported on the WWW 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.When it works the game does run smooth enough on pretty much any modern age graphics card. 

So the results you see today are INDICATIVE and not precise. This game is a mess to measure. We found a sweet spot setting that works pretty good and measure in a level (In Darkness Quarantine Zone, Singapore) that allows fairly consistent frame-rates. However the number you see WILL change even your GTX 980 TI or Fury X at one point will drop to 30 FPS These means that the results shown today are indicative, not a precise measurement by any standard. 

We'll show you graphics cards tested on three resolutions, Full HD (1920x1080), WHQD (2560x1440) and Ultra HD (3840 pixels × 2160 lines) along with some FCATS as well.