NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR upscaling are reportedly broken and pointless in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 seemingly has a serious problem which renders upscaling tech like NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS pretty much useless in the game.

This is the rather shaky state of affairs according to reports on Reddit, where Redditor 'Important_Shake_1491' has led the charge with pinning down evidence to the effect that DLSS and the other upscalers are essentially broken.

As you can see in the above post (which was noticed by Wccftech), the Redditor reckons that turning on DLSS (or whatever your chosen upscaling solution happens to be) in Black Ops 6 kicks in a performance overhead of something like 40%.

This basically means that whatever FPS gains you might get are nullified, or end up only very small upticks in the frame rate, while you're playing at a lesser quality than native resolution, of course. Yikes, in a word.

Important_Shake_1491 provides an example of DLSS (quality mode) only upping the frame rate by about 10%, even though the game is rendering almost 60% fewer pixels versus native. (The Redditor is testing with an Intel Core 9900K plus RTX 3080 on desktop, and Intel Core 12900H and RTX 3070 Ti on laptop, incidentally).

We're told this also affects Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (albeit only in its later seasons, the Redditor informs us) to add insult to injury, with apparently multiple reports of this, but no solution forthcoming as yet.

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Choppiness abounds, which won't help multiplayer in the slightest (Image Credit: Activision)

Other Redditors using DLSS are reporting anecdotally that Black Ops 6 feels very choppy with the feature turned on, and markedly much smoother when the NVIDIA tech is switched off. Not all reports are negative along these lines, mind, but there are a quite a few in that Reddit thread (enough to be worrying, certainly).

Furthermore, for some PC gamers, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 appears to be buggy in that it doesn't even give them the option to turn on DLSS at all. Or sometimes the option will be there, but it keeps disappearing, which is a real head scratcher, for sure.

Overall, it's all sounding more than a bit strange, and hopefully we'll have some investigation from the developer as to what's going on with the game and these upscaling technologies. The fact that there have been similar issues with Modern Warfare III, though, doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has only just emerged (it was on sale yesterday, on Steam and Battle.net, with the console version having been released today).