Call of Duty Black Ops game tweaks guide

Call of Duty: Black Ops looks set to be another massive hit for Activision, even allowing for the company’s slightly reduced expectations for sales. Even so, on release the multiplayer performance has been less than stunning.

Many report poor frame rates and keyboard-pummelling lag. We’ve experienced similar frustrations ourselves, so here’s the PC Format quick guide for getting smoother frame rates out of your machine.

First, take your graphics settings out of the equation by setting everything to fugly. You’ll be able to dial all those settings up again later, but when it comes to trying to sort out your connection and general performance settings, it’s worth easing back on the ol’ GPU first.

• Turn ANTI_ALIASING OFF.
• Set SYNC EVERY FRAME is set to NO.
• Set TEXTURE FILTERING to BILINEAR.
• TEXTURE QUALITY to LOW.
• Turn SHADOWS OFF.
• Turn BULLET IMPACTS OFF.

Well done, you’ve just made Call of Duty: Black Ops looks ten years old. It should, however, now spin along at silly frame rates. Give it a go, and see if it runs any smoother.

The next stage is to get your hands dirty and throw yourself, hands flailing, at the configuration file, where you’ll find far more juicy sounding settings. The jury is still out on which settings actually have any real effect on your performance, but try the following and cross your fingers.

You’ll find the config file in your Steam folder (by default “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam”) inside the “steamapps\common\call of duty black ops\players” folder.

Open the config_mp.cfg up in Wordpad and scroll down until you find the line:

• seta r_multiGpu “1”

Change the “1” to “0”.

IF, and only if you only have one video card. If you have multiple video cards (SLI mode), setting it to 0 will reduce performance.

Directly underneath it you’ll find:

• seta r_multithreaded_device “0”

Change the “0” to “1”.

Again, this is if, and only if you have a multi-core CPU.

There are plenty of other settings in here worth messing around with, including the all-important net code parameters – although with a rumoured overhaul in the netcode in the works, it’s not worth losing too much sleep over this.

The main value you need to mess around with is cl_maxpackets, which you should try setting to “100” to see if it makes any difference.

Also on PC Format:
Poll – Are you happy with Black Op’s multiplayer performance at launch?
QuickFix: Split screen Left 4 Dead 2
The Good, the Bad and the Plain Ugly of Black Ops Multiplayer by the PCF Clan

Call of Duty: Black Ops game tweak guides elsewhere: FragWorld

Posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010 at 5:22 pm under News. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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