What are the best Black Ops 6 settings for PC? The open beta is live now and our early testing suggests that Black Ops 6 will be the smoothest launch of a Call of Duty game on PC for quite some time. Frames are valuable in competitive shooters and pulling in high numbers in Black Ops 6 is a breeze so far.
The Black Ops 6 system requirements don’t call for the best graphics card, in fact, an Nvidia GeForce GTX card is even noted under the recommended specs. This reinforces the idea that you won’t need a superpowered gaming PC to run Black Ops 6, but the more power you have, the better your resulting frame rate will be.
Here are the best Black Ops 6 video and gameplay settings for PC:
Best Black Ops 6 graphics settings
- Upscaling/Sharpening: Off
- Nvidia DLSS Frame Generation: Off
- Texture Resolution: Normal
- Texture Filter Anisotropic: High
- Depth of Field: Off
- Nearby Level of Detail: High
- Particle Resolution: High
- Bullet Impacts: On
- Persistent Effects: On
- Shader Quality: High
- On-Demand Texture Streaming: Optimized
- Local Texture Streaming Quality: Normal
- Shadow Quality: Normal
- Screen Space Shadows: High
- Screen Space Ambient Lightning: High
- Screen Space Reflections: Normal
- Static Reflection Quality: High
- Tessellation: Near
- Volumetric Quality: High
- Deferred Physics Quality: High
- Weather Grid Volumes: High
- Water Quality: All
- VSync: Off
With the above settings, I was able to obtain a 151fps average at 2,560 x 1,440 with 82.4fps 1% lows. This improved up to 183fps as an average with 1% lows of 98.1fps at 1080p.
Given how crucial the new omni-movement technology is in Black Ops 6, you need to be running the game at the highest frame rate possible to fully benefit. The new movement system means firefights are decided based on millisecond reactions and you want to make sure you’re not dealing with lag or stuttering during gameplay.
There are tons of presets to cycle between if you want to take the easy route for improving performance, but Black Ops 6 also has a VRAM usage calculator which will let you know how heavy the demand will be on your GPU as you change certain settings.
One notable difference between the suggested settings for a competitive shooter vs a single-player game is the disabling of any kind of upscaling and frame generation technology. This is because they can introduce lag and ultimately impact your response times in matches. So, rather than leaning on DLSS, FRS, or XeSS as a crutch for better performance, it’s best to lower your general graphical settings bit by bit to find the sweet spot, but it is down to personal preference.
In my time testing out the beta, it’s well worth highlighting how much smoother the game seems when compared to recent Call of Duty releases, and even the perpetual state of Warzone. I suffered no random crashes, the shader complication was swift, and loading into matches was a breeze with no odd delays that see you starting a match on the back foot.
These early signs are promising and suggest that PC optimization is finally being taken seriously for Call of Duty, and Black Ops 6 will benefit massively as a result as the community will have nothing to moan about, at least not regarding performance.
Best gameplay and accessibility settings
There are some key gameplay settings that need to be changed when you first boot up Black Ops 6. These are found in the ‘View’ section of the graphics submenu.
- Field of View: 120
- World Motion Blur: Off
- Weapon Motion Blur: Off
- Motion Reduction: Off
On the accessibility front, readability settings are in place to aid with menu navigations and full-color customization is in place to aid anyone who is colorblind. There are also no fixed key bindings, meaning you can adjust everything to remap it to your needs. A ‘low motor strain’ preset also exists within the mapping presets if you don’t want to worry about creating your own layout.
How we test Black Ops 6
At PCGamesN, we use dedicated gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. The test rig used for Call of Duty Black Ops 6 includes the following components; Intel Core i7 11700F, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB, 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM, MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Widows 11 64-bit.
We always run our testing first at 1,920 x 1,080 to identify the best settings, then again at 2,560 x 1,440 using the same setup to gauge the difference in performance. We use CapFrameX to capture frame data and compare testing sessions.
Does Black Ops 6 need an SSD?
The Black Ops 6 system requirements list that an SSD is required for both the minimum and recommended tiers. Installing the game on an HDD may result in unstable performance or crashes, as well as the obvious issue of much longer load times, both when first booting up the game and during other level/map-loading moments in-game.
How to monitor performance in Black Ops 6
If you want to keep an eye on performance in Call of Duty Black Ops 6, we have an easy method that works whether you’re using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.
For Nvidia cards, ensure you have GeForce Experience or the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled. Then hit Alt + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + O.
Alternatively, you can download free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView, to get a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.
If you need to upgrade your hardware to start playing Black Ops 6, follow our handy guide on how to build a gaming PC, which takes takes you through the process step by step from start to finish.