Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Notebook Benchmarks

For the original German article, see here.

Graphics

After the overhasty release of the graphically premature Batman: Arkham Knight, the next AAA game came onto the market on November 6th, 2015. Once again, the title gives the PC platform a bad rap. The biggest con proves to be the game's unstable performance. Even on uber-powerful hardware, some levels and game situations stutter heftily for untraceable reasons, and reducing the settings doesn't solve the problem.

Computers with graphics cards that lack VRAM are especially prone to these performance drops. For example: Even though its overall performance is higher, the desktop version of the GTX 980 stuttered worse than its notebook counterpart, the GTX 980M, which is equipped with 8 GB of video memory rather than 4. When it comes to weaker models that hit their performance limits earlier, the discrepancies aren't quite as pronounced.

Black Ops 3 seems very poorly optimized for working memory as well. When we opened the Task Manager for testing purposes, we were astonished to see that the first-person shooter was gobbling all 8 GB of our desktop PC's memory. Speaking of switching windows: On some systems the screen went completely black after settings changes or immediately after the game startup, though we could still hear the sound in the background. In such cases, briefly exiting Full-screen Mode via Alt + Enter often resolved the problem. The game occasionally froze completely, however, forcing us to kill the EXE through the Task Manager.

Yet that's not all: Over the course of our tests, we also dealt with mouse bugs (after changing the resolution on our 4K monitor), graphics errors (mostly at low and medium detail settings), and strange fluctuations in load time. While most games' load times are dependent on the system's mass storage device (SSD vs. HDD), Black Ops 3 seems to be influenced by the potency of the other hardware as well.

Now, one could argue that a visually stunning first-person shooter is simply bound to eat up resources. But in our experience, the hardware demands and graphics quality aren't strictly related. With the exception of the detailed and well-animated characters, the game's visuals aren't especially impressive. During the campaign, the player often encounters muddy textures and second-rate effects (fire looks somewhat pathetic). True, Black Ops 3 has considerably more game physics elements than its predecessor, but overall the graphics seem somewhat antiquated. This makes the performance problems and bulky game size (almost 50 GB download) all the more irritating.

In terms of gameplay, buyers will get that familiar Call of Duty feeling: Diverse kinds of action in perfectly-tailored scenes. But under the hood, we discover that it's more about appearances than substance: The game is plagued with poorly executed AI, excessively large enemy waves and a chaotically-presented story. Nor does the game require much in the way of strategy in single-player mode, and the difficulty level is disappointing.

But back to the graphics: In some instances, the title certainly deserves praise. While we criticized Advanced Warfare for the frustrating experience of scrolling through the graphics menu, Black Ops 3's design is substantially cleaner here. The graphics settings are divided into two tabs: "Video" includes the basic options like resolution, brightness and field of view, while "Advanced" allows the user to make adjustments to the features.

Black Ops 3 utilizes numerous modern technologies like subsurface scattering and volumetric lighting. All in all, the two menus contain more than 20 options - a very broad array for a PC game. Excellent: Alongside anti-aliasing, the user can also change the maximum frame rate. The latter runs from 24 to 240. The game also offers Vsync, which prevents image tearing.

We are even more pleased to report that all settings can be applied without restarting (even while the game is running). There do appear to be some small bugs remaining, though. In our tests, some options (ex. anti-aliasing and ambient occlusion) weren't always correctly saved, forcing us to visit the graphics menu two or three separate times. It was also somewhat aggravating that the mouse speed is contingent on the general performance, and in extreme cases the menus were impossible to use. (On the plus side, it's immediately clear when a setting overloads the system.)

Shortly after the title's release, many buyers also complained about the performance of dual-core processors. Intel's Core i5 models have cropped up especially frequently in this context. However, because we ran all the benchmarks with the first patch (released on the game's launch day), we hardly encountered this problem.