With consoles targeting 60 frames per second, Call of Duty has to cram the rendering for each frame into around 16ms, and this broken up into two distinct phases. First of all, the basics of the scene are calculated and lit - a process that takes around seven milliseconds. The next seven milliseconds is spent on basically everything else: volumetrics and post-processing, for example. Around 1.5 to 2.5 milliseconds is spent on temporal upsampling - integrating visual data from prior frames into the current one. The more detail rich a scene is, the heavier the cost in rendering terms. Asynchronous compute is used on all systems, including PC. It's more heavily optimised on consoles though, providing performance uplifts of around 20 to 30 per cent in the expensive scenes. Systems like volumetrics and particles can run asynchronously.
All of this technology comes together to make Warzone possible - and even factoring out IW8's application in campaign and core multiplayer, its deployment for battle royale alone sees a radical improvement in technology, visual fidelity and performance over other genre entries. Compare and contrast with the fortunes of PUBG that launched late in 2017 and it's fascinating to see how colossal the improvement is in every regard in less than 2.5 years. Back in May 2019, I first visited Infinity Ward to get
a breakdown on the technological leap delivered by IW8, and it was clear that this engine was designed to straddle the generations and to allow Infinity Ward and other COD studios to transition more seamlessly to PS5 and Xbox Series X. What we didn't know was what hardware the developers would have access to.
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