Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , November 26, 2012
Author:
Grady McKinney
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Call of Duty: Black Ops II Performance & IQ Review

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is the first Call of Duty game on PC to support DX11 and new graphical features. Hopefully improvements to the IW Engine will be enough to boost the CoD franchise near the top graphics-wise. We also examine NVIDIA's TXAA technology which combines shader based antialiasing and traditional multisampling AA.

Introduction

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Call of Duty: Black Ops II is a first-person shooter game that has single player campaign, multiplayer, and a zombie mode. It is the ninth game in the Call of Duty series, and is the direct sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops. The new game was released on November 13th, 2012 and sold over 11 million units in the first week alone. The game was developed by Treyarch and published by Activision and Square-Enix.

The campaign in Call of Duty: Black Ops II takes place in the year 2025 with a few flashback missions to the 1970s. In 2025 the US is engaged in a cold war with China, where most fighting is centralized around robotics, electronics, and technology. CoD:BO II also includes the popular "Zombies" game mode that allows players to team up with friends to survive against the invading zombies as long as possible. The trademark that this game will be remembered by however is the multiplayer gameplay which pits you against others players around the world.

There are a few specific reasons that we are looking at Call of Duty: Black Ops II. This is the first game in the CoD franchise to support DX11 on PC. This means that the game is being rendered in the latest API and will hopefully lead to better textures, effects, and environments, and hopefully provide top of the line graphics. The other important thing that this game brings is our first encounter with NVIDIA's TXAA technology to improve antialiasing using both shaders and traditional multisampling.

Graphics Settings

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The shots of the menu above show the few graphics options that are available.

Texture Quality : This setting can be enabled at low, normal, high, extra, and automatic. This will determine the overall quality of all textures in game.

Texture Filtering : This option can be enabled at low, medium, and high. This will determine the quality of the textures that are rendered to the screen, and how crisp the textures look in the short distance.

Ambient Occlusion : This setting has can be enabled at SSAO, HBAO, or disabled. Enabling either SSAO or HBAO will cause a drop in performance, because of the feature it brings to the game. HBAO will deliver the best image quality by creating more realistic shadows, but has the largest performance loss in this setting. SSAO does not create as realistic shadows as HBAO, but it does improve the image quality compared to ambient occlusion disabled, and has a moderate impact on performance.

Antialiasing : This setting can be enabled at 2X MSAA, 4X MSAA, 8X MSAA. For NVIDIA video cards users will be able to select 16X CSAA as well as 2X TXAA and 4X TXAA. Both AMD and NVIDIA video cards can enable FXAA along with MSAA, and NVIDIA GPUs can also use TXAA to improve the quality of antialiasing.

TXAA : This antialiasing setting can either be enabled at 2X TXAA or 4X TXAA, but only on NVIDIA video cards. TXAA is not entirely a shader program like FXAA. TXAA uses some of the multisampling technology as well as the FXAA technology and blends these together. NVIDIA's goal is to provide users a way to experience image quality like 8X MSAA without the significant performance drop. Until now there have not been very many games that support TXAA. Since it is our first time going over this graphics option will be dedicating a page just to TXAA to see the performance and image quality it brings to the table.

Testing Call of Duty: Black Ops II

To test Call of Duty: Black Ops II we first played through the entire game. We looked for scenes, levels, or areas which produced lower framerates than others. Our run-through takes place on the mission "Judgment Day." The mission starts off in a plane where we have to skydive past exploding ships and incoming missiles. After a moment we land on the ground and continue our assault on the enemies’ headquarters. This mission is filled with enemies, keeping us in combat nearly the entire time. The level also includes every aspect that we look for in a game. There are intense firefights; part of the level is outdoors, while the rest is indoors. There is also a lot going on in the surroundings, including the sky. Inside the building there are many objects being rendered which helps push the video cards as far as these will go. The entire run-through takes between 7 and 8 minutes to complete. Our ideal framerate that delivers smooth and enjoyable gameplay in Call of Duty: Black Ops II is around 45 FPS.