If you've been playing all of last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, you should be able to run Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 without needing to buy new parts. Miraculously, it seems to take the exact same storage space too, so you can make just enough room for it by deleting the last entry. You'll be better off that way.
Despite my personal misgivings with the last entry in the COD franchise, Black Ops 6 is shaping up to work a treat on minimally powerful gear.
With just a GTX 1650 and an AMD Ryzen 5 1400, two bits of gear that launched more than five years ago, you can get Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 running on its minimum settings. This will give you access to the new singleplayer campaign set in the '90s, multiplayer with a new movement and old prestige system, and the return to round-based easter egg-filled zombies. The game itself will launch on October 25, this year, though the beta is set to go live in just a few days on August 30, if you have preordered the game.
If you want to test your rig before committing to the purchase, the open beta is set to go live on September 6, with it ending a few days later on September 9. The fine print in the beta announcement clarifies this is multiplayer only, and multiplayer last year required slightly less beefy specs so it isn't clear how the beta performance will translate to singleplayer just yet. It should give you a good idea of how the game runs though.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Minimum requirements | Recommended requirements |
|---|---|---|
| OS: | Windows 10 64 Bit | Windows 10 / Windows 11 64 Bit |
| Processor: | AMD Ryzen 5 1400 / Intel Core i5 6600 | AMD Ryzen 5 1600X / Intel Core i7 6700K |
| Memory: | 8 GB RAM | 16 GB RAM |
| Graphics: | AMD Radeon RX 470 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 or 1650 | AMD Radeon 6600 XT / Intel Arc A770 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or RTX 3060 |
| Storage: | 149 GB (78 GB if COD HQ and Warzone are already installed) | 149 GB (78 GB if COD HQ and Warzone are already installed) |
Perhaps the most interesting part of these requirements is that the storage space is identical to last year's game, in both instances. This could be a strange coincidence, or perhaps more likely a sign of specific optimization.
As well as this, there aren't unique requirements for the multiplayer, like in previous years—with all game modes requiring the same specs. With Modern Warfare 3, you can play the multiplayer mode even if your CPU isn't strong enough to handle the campaign. The same does not appear to be true for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Let's hope it's worth the storage space this time.
