Using upscaling techniques to boost the performance of games on PC has essentially become part of the setup process. Even if you don’t consider the many games that simply won’t run at acceptable framerates without it, a lot of games certainly get a nice bump in framerate because of DLSS, FSR or Intel XESS.
As a modern game, Black Ops 6 does indeed support all three, but it doesn’t look like they do anything at the moment.
That’s according to multiple players on Reddit, all of whom have reported minimal to no increase in performance when using DLSS, FSR, and XESS. In fact, according to one player who performed tests on two different PCs, turning on upscaling may even lead to worse performance.
Reddit user Important_Shake_1491 shared their testing results in a Reddit thread, showing that in most cases, performance can drop significantly when using upscaling, which is not how this should work. DLSS was the only one to boost performance, but the tradeoff in clarity may not be worth a sub 10% gain in framerate.
“Spatial upscaling (NIS, FSR1) appeared to work without the insane performance drop, but this is suboptimal as the game already has superior form of upscaling built into its own anti aliasing since Modern Warfare 2019,” they added.
Obviously, this doesn’t make sense, so the natural conclusion one could come to here is that there’s a bug causing this unusual behaviour. Other players have reported that frame generation – which Black Ops 6 also supports – does indeed work, but not everyone is happy to turn that on because of the hit to input latency it introduces.
Treyarch has yet to respond, but considering how many players rely on upscaling for better performance, we’re bound to get some acknowledgement sooner rather than later. Until then, you should probably run the in-game benchmark to see if upscaling has any effect on your game’s performance, without assuming it does.