CoD Black Ops Cold War on RTX 3080: Performance comparison with ray tracing and DLSS

Since Friday, November 13th, Call of Duty has been back to the "fight!" - We have already tested this latest Call of Duty offshoot, Black OPs Cold War. For many gamers, optics are particularly important in the single-player campaign, but performance is also a point. And this is where two possible elements that Nvidia's RTX graphics cards specialize in come into play: Raytracing and DLSS. Especially to see how the ray tracing effects change the graphics, we took a closer look at Call of Duty: Black OP's Cold War.

Raytracing

Raytracing is not an invention of Nvidia. Rather, it is a very original way of calculating 3D graphics. We published a special about ray tracing a good two years ago. Translated, the word raytracing means something like ray tracing. And the core hits that very well. Because with ray tracing, virtual rays that start by the user or his "camera" are followed into the 3D scene.

Call of Duty Black OPs Cold War in Vietnam Source: Screenshot Antonio Funes Reflections, light sources and so on from the objects that the rays hit are taken into account - but objects and light sources are also taken into account that cannot be seen by the current camera and that influence the light conditions, colors and shadow formation. The usual 3D engines only pay attention to what can be seen from the camera. The advantage of ray tracing is that the result is very realistic if you rely on this calculation for the complete 3D image. Therefore, ray tracing has been used for graphics computation in Hollywood films for many years. The disadvantage is that it eats up a lot of power, which is not a problem with movies.

Because the images do not have to be calculated in real time when watching the film, but are calculated image by image in the course of the production of the film. Of course, it is now possible to calculate many more images per working day than, for example, in the days of "The Abyss" by James Cameron, in which ray tracing was first used in 1989 at a level that was fascinatingly realistic for the viewer. At that time the technology was only used for a few minutes of film, as it was still extremely expensive, but also because the calculation still required so much time that one had to limit oneself to a sequence that only lasted a few minutes in the film.

In But gaming requires at least 30 frames per second in real time. For this purpose, Nvidia has had the RTX graphics card series on the market since autumn 2018. The RT stands for ray tracing. These graphics cards have additional computing modules that are specifically responsible for graphic calculations based on the raytracing idea. However, even Nvidia's current flagship GeForce RTX 3090 would be too weak to calculate the complete picture in a game using ray tracing and to offer graphics that offer at least what one is used to from normal game graphics.

Since the introduction of RTX technology, there have been elements in some games that are implemented using ray tracing, such as shadows or reflections. At first glance, these are only minor details, especially when you consider that these things can also be implemented with a normal graphics engine. With ray tracing, however, these elements can give the game graphics the finishing touches in order to create an even more realistic atmosphere and to represent the scene (in the physical sense) in an optically correct manner. The new AMD graphics cards could also calculate these ray tracing effects. But since they have no specialized components, this costs significantly more performance than with an RTX graphics card.