Call of Duty: Black Ops is the seventh game in the Call of Duty series, which has rapidly become one of the biggest-selling entertainment franchises of all time. As a first person shooter set during the Cold War, Black Ops provides both an immersive singleplayer campaign, and a fast-paced multiplayer component which should be familiar to anyone who has played previous COD games online. The aim of this guide is to allow you to better understand and best utilize the various configuration options available in the game, as well as covering the important advanced tweaks.
The game's minimum system requirements are provided below, and are quite low for a modern PC game:
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 / AMD Phenom X3 8750 or better
- Memory: 2GB RAM
- Hard Drive: At least 12 GB of free space
- Video Card: Shader 3.0 or better (e.g. GeForce 8600GT or higher)
- Sound Card: Direct X 9.0c compatible
- OS: Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7
What follows are full descriptions for Call of Duty: Black Ops's in-game settings, including screenshot comparisons to highlight the impact on image quality of changing the various settings. Performance information is also provided for every setting, although bear in mind that the precise impact on your particular system depends on your specific hardware combination and your other game and system-wide settings. The aim here is to give you enough information so that you can make an informed choice as to the settings you enable or disable to obtain the precise balance of visual quality and performance which is acceptable to you.
Legal Disclaimer
The recommendations in this guide are not endorsed by Activision or Treyarch. Please use them at your own risk. Activision and Call of Duty: Black Ops are trademarks of Activision Publishing Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the properties of their respective owners.General System Optimization
Almost as important as any in-game setting is the way your Windows installation is configured. A great many problems and performance issues, especially stuttering, crashes and sudden slowdowns, can be traced directly to sub-optimal settings in Windows and out-of-date or badly configured drivers. For this reason it is recommended that you download the relevant version of the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion (TGTC) and take the time to optimize your Windows installation correctly. At the very least make sure to update your graphics drivers to the latest available version.Performance Measurement
To successfully conduct any tweaking, you will need some way of objectively measuring your performance in Frames Per Second (FPS). The quickest and easiest way to measure your FPS in any game is to use the free FRAPS utility. Download, install and launch FRAPS before starting up Call of Duty: Black Ops. You will now see a yellow FPS counter displayed in the corner of your screen.If you don't wish to use FRAPS, you can enable a framerate counter within Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer by first making sure that under the Game section of the Settings the 'Enable Console' option is set to Yes, then within an MP game press the ~ key (the key above TAB) to open the command console at the top of the screen. Type /cg_drawfps 1 in the console and press Enter to enable the FPS counter. You can disable this counter at any time by entering /cg_drawfps 0 in the console.
Pay attention to the FPS figure, particularly during graphically intense scenes, such as in heavy combat - if it dips into the low double or single digits for example, this is a good indication that you need to adjust various settings until your minimum FPS is consistently above 25-30 in singleplayer, and higher still (e.g. 40FPS +) in multiplayer given its fast-paced nature.
Note that in Call of Duty: Black Ops your framerate is capped to a maximum of around 85FPS, even if you disable VSync. To learn more about VSync, and for the advanced tweak required to remove this engine cap, see the Sync Every Frame setting later in this guide.
