Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Optimized Settings: Best Settings for BO6 on PC (2025)

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the latest installment in Activision’s popular first-person shooter franchise. Now owned by Microsoft, and consequently available to Game Pass subscribers from day 1, this year has had many firsts for the industry. Black Ops 6 doesn’t look much different from Modern Warfare 3 (our guide) but performs worse. This is our optimization guide for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 recommending the best settings for PC players.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

• Enable Resizable BAR.
• Turn on Game Mode.
• Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
• Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
• Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
• Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
• Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
• Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 System Requirements

Contents & Testing Methodology

• Benchmarks at a glance:
  1. Resolution, Upscaling, and Frame Generation.
  2. Graphics Presets.
  3. Texture Filtering, LOD, and Particle Resolution.
  4. Persistent Effects, Texture Streaming, and Shader Quality.
  5. Shadows and Reflection Quality.
  6. Tesselation, Volumetrics, and Water Quality.
  7. FOV Scaling.
  8. VRAM usage.
  9. CPU bottlenecks.
  10. Performance Summary.
  11. Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Optimized Settings PC.
• Hardware setup used:
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
  • Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
  • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti FE.
  • Motherboard: MSI MPG B650 Edge WiFi.
  • Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.

Black Ops 6: Resolution, Upscaling & Frame Generation

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 scales well across resolutions, averaging 90 FPS at 1080p, 72 FPS at 1440p, and a very playable 64.5 FPS at 4K using the maximum quality settings. These numbers were obtained at the native resolutions without upscaling or frame generation.

Upscaling is critical for attaining fluid performance in modern AAA gaming. Black Ops 6 features all noteworthy upscalers but are unstable and performance fluctuates wildly. NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.7 upscaler delivered the best performance, while FSR 3 and XeSS 1.3 were nowhere as effective. Enabling the former’s “Ultra Performance” mode causes the game to freeze, something we’ve never seen before.

DLAA is nearly -30% slower than native 4K, and even enabling frame generation doesn’t make it much faster. The quality preset is 20% faster, while balanced grants a 25% uplift. The performance preset yields a 42% increase, followed by the ultra-performance mode which is 83% faster than native.

FSR 3 “Fluid Motion Frames” frame generation can be paired with DLSS, XeSS, or FSR for a hefty performance boost. We obtained an average of 102 FPS to 160 FPS upon pairing frame generation with upscaling presets. Be sure to enable reflex if you’re using frame generation.

Black Ops 6: Graphics Presets

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 features five predefined graphics presets. The performance ranges from 82 FPS at “Extreme” to 100 FPS at “Ultra,” 114 FPS at “Balanced,” and 120 FPS at the “Minimum” quality preset.

These numbers indicate that the second-highest quality preset offers the ideal blend of quality and performance, granting a ~20% FPS bump over “Extreme.”

Texture Filtering, LOD & Particle Resolution

Texture Filtering is a staple in modern gaming, sampling distant mipmaps for sharper and clearer textures. The performance hit is around 5% at the highest quality (Ultra or AF 16x), but it can be set to “Normal” or AF 4x for slightly higher framerates.

Detail Quality sets the LOD or mesh complexity of the terrain, vegetation, and other 3D objects onscreen. Luckily, it has a negligible impact on performance.

Particle Quality can significantly impact performance during firefights or explosive encounters. It sets the resolution of particle effects like smoke, embers, dust particles, etc. It profoundly affects lighting by blocking luminant sources and casting additional shadows. The highest quality setting can reduce 1% lows by more than 15%.

Persistent Effects, Texture Streaming & Shader Quality

Persistent Effects enable different visual effects cast by fire and explosions near the surface. It subtly impacts performance but can tank the lows (~15%) during intensive sequences.

Local Texture Streaming Quality sets the LOD of distant textures, replacing them with low-resolution mipmaps at “Low.” It grants a healthy performance gain without notably affecting quality.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 leverages local and on-demand textures. The former is loaded from the local storage, while the latter is downloaded in real-time. If you’re running low on storage space or have a slow internet, you may want to set it to “Minimal” which downloads only the basic assets.

Conversely, setting it to optimized and increasing the texture cache allocation (up to 64 GB) can improve visual quality by downloading high-quality textures in real time.

Shader Quality is a performance-intensive setting that controls how light impacts different surfaces. In most cases, it lightens or darkens surfaces, washing out the area’s existing shadows and lighting. It cuts performance by over 20% and is best left at the medium setting.

Shadows & Reflection Quality

Depending on your setting, shadow quality can have a mild to modest impact on performance. While the lowest three options negligibly impact framerates, the ultra-quality option can reduce the average FPS by ~10%.

Screen Space Shadows produce ambient shadows, often along edges and corners, and supplement standard shadows with refined borders. They decrease the average FPS by 4-5% and are best left at “Low.”

Black Ops 6 features four different technologies for calculating the ambient lighting. These are GTAO (Low), GTSO (Medium), MDAO (High), and Global Illumination (Ultra):

• Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion or GTAO, similar to HBAO+, upgrades SSAO with a horizon-based approach but is supposed to be faster.
• Ground Truth Specular Occlusion or GTSO, adds specular occlusion to the algorithm without affecting performance.
• MDAO is a more aggressive technique that produces larger shadows and darkens prebaked shadows.
• The highest quality setting employs some form of global illumination. It looks very similar to MDAO but avoids excessive shading like the former.

Ambient Occlusion is a key aspect of in-game lighting. It adds self-contained shadows along edges, crevices, and corners. It reduces framerates by 4-5% and is best left at the medium-quality preset.

Screen Space Reflections are used to cast dynamic reflections on glossy and semi-glossy objects by re-rendering visible objects at a lower resolution. It moderately impacts performance, decreasing the FPS by 4-5%.

Static Reflections generally refer to pre-baked reflections (usually cube-maps). These are rendered from memory and mildly impact performance. However, in Black Ops 6, we noticed a drop of less than 3% in the average FPS.

Tesselation, Volumetrics & Water Quality

Tesselation increases mesh detail (polygon count), usually ground or terrain. This is achieved by subdividing relatively coarse object meshes on a primitive level, to produce finer results. Its impact on quality and performance tends to be subtle.

Volumetrics Quality sets the resolution of light shafts, fog, clouds, etc. It reduces performance by 3-4% in most scenes. For most PCs, the highest or second-highest option should work fine.

Water Quality enables caustics and wetness effects caused when water comes into contact with a surface. There aren’t many scenarios where you’ll come in contact with water bodies in Black Ops 6, hence you can leave it at the highest quality setting.

Field of View Scaling

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has a 90-degree FOV by default. This can be reduced to 60 or increased to 120. Interestingly, the performance tends to improve at higher and deteriorate at lower values.

Deferred Physics sets the terrain quality or water body deformation during explosions and other destructive sequences. If you’re facing drops during such scenes, consider reducing it to the lowest. Remaining settings like “Depth of Field,” “Weather Grid Volumes,” and “Bullet Impacts” don’t notably impact performance and are left to personal preference.

Black Ops 6: VRAM Usage & Texture Quality

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 uses over 11 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Extreme.” Reducing the graphics to “Ultra” brings the VRAM consumption to 9 GB, while “Balanced” and “Basic” use 6.2 GB and 5.22 GB, respectively.

The VRAM usage doesn’t change much with resolution. We observed an average graphics memory consumption of over 10 GB at 1080p and 1440p with the “Extreme” quality graphics preset.

Black Ops 6: CPU Bottlenecks

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is predominantly GPU-bound, even on midrange PCs. We recorded an average GPU-Busy deviation of 8% at 1080p, twice the value observed at 1440p. 4K is completely GPU-bound.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Performance Summary

The most taxing graphics settings include “Shader Quality,” “Local Texture Streaming,” and “Particle Resolution.” High-resolution screenshots can be viewed on this G-Drive link.

Best Settings for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 PC

Black Ops 6 Settings for Low-end PC: RTX 3060/RTX 4060/RX 6600

We’ve got optimized settings for budget hardware, including the RTX 3060 or RX 6600. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 easily produces an average of over 100 FPS at 1080p without frame generation and a whopping 160 FPS with frame generation on the RTX 3060. All you need to do is tweak a few settings. More on that here.

Black Ops 6 Settings for RTX 3060|4060 Laptop GPU