Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 just came out, and while I was really not looking forward to playing the campaign, the open beta back in October had, at the very least, kept me excited about the multiplayer. It's nothing groundbreaking, and really more of the same, but there's nothing to complain about the multiplayer, at least. All that aside, however, another thing that had me excited to play the game at release was to benchmark it against a few of the GPUs I've got handy, just to see how modern and aging hardware handle the latest Call of Duty game.

So, I went ahead and tested Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 on a six-year-old card in the GTX 1660 Ti, my two-year-old RTX 4070 Ti, and my brother-in-law's AMD RX 7800 XT for good measure. The results? Well, let's just say that almost all of these cards succeeded in playing the game with varying degrees of success, but it only happened after I made Black Ops 7 follow in Battlefield 6's footsteps with one important graphics setting.

My ever-reliable GTX card couldn't handle Black Ops 7

Not without frame generation, at least, in an online shooter

My GTX 1660Ti, which I lovingly gave over to my partner after building her a PC and finally introducing her to gaming, has been the best graphics card I've ever had. It's an absolute trooper, and six years on, it still manages to have enough in itself to let her hop on for an occasional game of Fortnite, or emulate some of my recommended PS2 games for her.

With Black Ops 7, however, I wasn't all that hopeful. For starters, we stuck to a 1080p resolution for this one, with ray-tracing completely off. DLSS doesn't work with the 1660Ti, so AMD's FSR 3.1 was my best friend throughout the benchmarking run. The best part? The game has its own in-game benchmarking tool, which, to me, is always a godsend. While simple upscaling with FSR did help get 60+ fps on most graphics settings, Ultra settings at 1080p were simply not on the cards. As such, I didn't even bother with the Extreme preset, which is the highest graphics preset in Black Ops 7.

Moving to 1440p resolution, the GTX 1660Ti could barely touch 60 fps, even with FSR's Quality upscaler giving it everything. So, getting stable numbers north of 60fps required turning on AMD's frame generation. It's... decent, but if it were any other online shooter (one where I cared about my performance and kills), I would've steered clear of generated frames.

Even my 4070 Ti failed at handling Black Ops 7's ray tracing

The RT implementation in this game is... something

This was perhaps the most surprising test I did. With my RTX 4070 Ti, I didn't think I'd run into any trouble at all, especially running Black Ops 7 on my 1440p 144Hz monitor. However, there was one setting that changed everything — Ray Traced Reflections. Turning RT on with the extreme graphics preset gave me less than 30fps on Native resolution, and I know RT was the culprit here, because even minimum settings with RT on couldn't get me past 44fps in the game.

It wasn't until I turned on DLSS and set it to Balanced that I got three-digit numbers on the frame counter. At 1440p, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's implementation of ray-traced reflections is too heavy on the hardware, with little to no returns on the screen. No matter how hard I tried, turning RT on seemed to do nothing visually, while eating into more than half my frames.

It was the same story when I switched to a 4K display. Native 4K on a 4070 Ti was anyway going to be tough, but with ray-tracing on, I got a glorious 16fps before realizing that I must keep it off if I wanted anything remotely playable. The takeaway? The 4070 Ti can handle Black Ops 7 at 4K, provided you're okay with keeping ray-tracing off, and upscaling from Balanced or dropping to a lower preset.

An RX 7800 XT nearly beat my card at 4K

Of course, ray tracing wasn't involved

Jumping over to an AMD RX 7800 XT, I was curious to see how a similar card would fare with a higher VRAM ceiling. Of course, AMD cards have been known to perform worse than Team Green's GPUs when it comes to Ray Tracing, and in-game where RT is this performance-hungry with barely anything to show for it, I chose to forgo RT entirely at 4K. First off, however, was 1440p, where I kept Ray Tracing Reflections on at native resolution to see what the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7800 XT could do. The results were less than favorable with ray-tracing on, but immensely impressive when I turned it off.

At this point, I realized that shutting down Ray Tracing was the only way to get good frames, so after switching over to 4K with the 7800 XT, I chose to steer completely clear of the RT settings. Instead, I just tinkered around with the game's top-three graphics presets, and on 4K, the card put up some mighty numbers, even at native resolution.

There's no way to enjoy Black Ops 7 without turning off Ray Tracing

There's absolutely no upside to this one graphic setting — keep it off

That's the absolute bottom line, no matter how you put it. I'd have loved to have a 50-series card to test the game on as well, but even then, we're still talking about a top-of-the-line graphics card that barely over 1% of Steam users have. Regardless, ray tracing implementation in Black Ops 7 is simply not it. Even while I pixel-peep, it's nearly impossible to see any difference visually when I turn on Ray Tracing Reflections.

The difference, however, is just nothing short of gigantic. The game, which otherwise has some rather wonderful optimization and rasterized graphics, becomes borderline unplayable when it comes to RT reflections. As such, in good conscience, I couldn't recommend turning on ray tracing in Black Ops 7 while playing the game, even if you do have a card that manages to put it in playable territory either through simple upscaling or frame generation.

Black Ops 7 is incredibly optimized, but strictly in raster

There you have it — the new Call of Duty game, for all the things it gets wrong, gets its optimization and playability right, at least. This was actually pretty clear from October's open-beta, as the game was pretty well-polished at that time as well. I've gone on about the terrible ray-tracing tax the game demands, and how little it has to show for it, but RT aside, it plays well, it plays smooth, and a GPUs that are several years old still easily gets huge numbers playing it thanks to some incredible upscaling tech by AMD and Nvidia, both.