Select Page 1 - Introduction 2 - Test Setup 3 - Highest Playable Settings 4 - Apples to Apples 5 - TXAA Comparisons 6 - Image Quality 7 - Conclusion

Date: Monday , November 26, 2012 Author: Grady McKinney Editor: Brent Justice

Call of Duty: Black Ops II Performance & IQ Review Call of Duty: Black Ops II is the first Call of Duty game on PC to support DX11 and new graphical features. Hopefully improvements to the IW Engine will be enough to boost the CoD franchise near the top graphics-wise. We also examine NVIDIA's TXAA technology which combines shader based antialiasing and traditional multisampling AA.

Apples-to-Apples Performance Comparisons

In these apples-to-apples tests we will be testing all video cards at 1920x1080 with Call of Duty: Black Ops II set to run with the highest in-game settings available in order to find the performance users can expect to see at 1080p with both 8X MSAA and FXAA enabled.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 vs. AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670

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While playing at 1080p with 8X MSAA and FXAA enabled, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 averaged 140.9 FPS. While we were playing with these settings at 2560x1600 the GeForce GTX 680 averaged 91.9 FPS. This means that by dropping from 2560x1600 to 1920x1080, the video card will perform 53.3% faster.

The GeForce GTX 680 was 3.2% faster than the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition while playing at these settings. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition averaged 136.5 FPS at 1080p with 8X MSAA and FXAA enabled. It was very close in performance compared to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670. The GeForce GTX 670 averaged 135.9 FPS at the same settings. We did notice that the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition was running smoother and more consistently than the GeForce GTX 670, giving it the advantage in gameplay at these settings.

All three of these video cards smashed through Call of Duty: Black Ops II's highest available settings at 1080p. The best performance was with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, but there was no significant difference in this performance compared to both the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670.

AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs. AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition

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When playing at 1080p the AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost averaged 115.9 FPS with 8X MSAA and FXAA enabled. This is about 20 FPS slower than the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Regardless, the performance was excellent and provided enjoyable lag free gameplay with a crisp and clear image quality.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti was the fastest of these three video cards. It averaged 119.4 FPS at these settings while delivering the same lag free gameplay experience. The Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition averaged 101 FPS at 1080p while using the same settings.