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You've got to hand it to Treyarch - the team's Call of Duty titles always push boundaries in terms of scale, scope and spectacle. Blacks Ops 3 delivers yet another bombastic Call of Duty campaign, this time backed by four-player online co-op, along with a two-player local split-screen mode. The team's technological ambitions are also remarkable in terms of the game's visuals: physically-based rendering, simulated global illumination and a battery of impressive post effects work makes this new campaign the most visually arresting yet.But has the developer perhaps pushed its technology too far? The campaign co-op demo revealed at this year's E3 had us slightly concerned: frame-rates throughout the demo often fell short of the desired 60fps target, even dipping below 30fps. On top of the optimisation effort, it seems that the team's solution to the performance challenge was to implement yet another ambitious piece of technology: dynamic resolution scaling. This involves adjusting pixel-count on the fly, depending on the engine load - it's a way of freeing up valuable GPU time without permanently compromising on image quality, and produced some remarkably smooth results in the recently released Halo 5.
So how does the dynamic scaler work in Black Ops 3? Both Xbox One and PS4 versions render in native 1080p during cut-scenes, and for the most part full HD quality is retained throughout the duration of these sequences. Anti-aliasing is handled via the use of filmic SMAA, successfully providing good coverage across geometry edges, though some texture blurring is apparent. PS4 doesn't appear to drop below 1080p at all in these scenes, whereas the Xbox One version seems to transition down to 1728x1080 just before gameplay kicks off - and that's where the scaler really gets to work.
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