An enemy sprints through a doorway. I put my reticle on him, ready to catch him off-guard. Then, I aim down my sights, only for everything to go sideways in seconds. My screen hitches up and the game lags, delaying my shot. By the time I'm actually scoped in on him, it's too late - he's seen me and painted the pavement with my brains.
This, for a good fifteen levels of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War's multiplayer, was my experience. Time and time again, I would line up a great shot, only for my game to stutter and freeze as soon as I tried to scope. In modes like TDM or FFA, this made me actively useless unless I was firing from the hip, using melee attacks, or abusing the game's nasty proximity mines.
At first, like any good online gamer, I blamed this on latency issues. My overall KDA and W/L ratio were fine enough that I could keep coasting, so I figured that it was probably a connection issue and chalked it up to lag. However, after doing some connection tests, I found out that my ping was above average in most cases, meaning that it almost certainly wasn't a connection problem.
So, what was the deal here? Why was my game slowing down and sputtering back to life when I wanted to line up a shot, and was there any way to fix it? As it turns out, the problem was right under my nose the whole time. After disabling ray tracing in the game's visual settings, the stutter was all but gone, and the lag was fixed. Also, as expected, the framerate ticked up quite a bit. Now at level 23, I never experience any of those same issues.
Why is this? Well, simply put... ray tracing is still a finicky technology on PC, let alone on consoles. My hunch is that the Xbox Series X simply can't handle whatever ray tracing implementation Black Ops Cold War houses, and therefore takes a massive performance hit when enabled. It's worth noting that PS5 users have also reported sub-optimal framerates when ray tracing was turned on.
It's especially noticeable with maps that utilize a lot of natural outdoor lighting, such as the sunset-drenched Moscow, which all but confirms it. But that being the case, what is there to be done here? Is this a hardware limitation, or simply a performance issue that can be patched out? That's unclear at this point.
Hopefully, though, there are long-term plans to do serious work on the game's performance going forward. I've run into my own share of performance issues with Black Ops Cold War on Xbox Series X - including ones that don't let me finish the campaign.