Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has a performance glitch on the PS5 which can lead to frame rate issues when running with ray-tracing mode.
Black Ops Cold War runs at 120 FPS on the PS5 and Xbox Series X. It also supports a ray-tracing mode on both next-gen consoles that run at 60 FPS at 4K resolution. According to some reports including from John Linneman, who works at Digital Foundry, there is currently a bug with the PS5 version which can drop frame rate randomly.
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Basically, there is a bug in the game which can lead to the PS5 version dropping its frame rate randomly. This is random because the frame rate appears to have been fixed if the user restarts from a checkpoint.
As shared by Digital Foundry, this bug is tied to the checkpoint system on the PS5. If restarted from a checkpoint, the frame rate issues are resolved as well.
After re-testing, let's summarise: there is no RT on Series S but there was a shadow glitch. There is a performance dip on PS5 in RT mode, but this appears to be a bug as a checkpoint restart can improve matters (but not always!). Here's a vid showing that: pic.twitter.com/ilyOqhNAtC
— Digital Foundry (@digitalfoundry) November 24, 2020
So the temporary fix, for now, is to restart from a checkpoint. Although, this won’t always fix the frame rate drops on the PS5. It can prove to be useful as an alternative until an official fix is released by Activision.
Recently, it was reported that Black Ops Cold War has ray-tracing support on the Xbox Series S, but this turned out to be a false alarm since there was no way to enable ray-tracing on Microsoft’s cheaper next-generation console. In the case of Call of Duty, ray-tracing is used to improve the quality of shadows instead of adding higher-quality reflections to the game.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is available now for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It also supports PS5 and Xbox Series X with next-generation upgrades.
