Call of Duty: Black Ops GPU & CPU Performance In-depth

"So on that note, I'm not going to rush out and buy a i7 950 just for this game - yet."

This is exactly why this performance review is more than just misinforming. It's flat out detrimental. The uninformed may read this and go out to buy hardware they THINK may run this game better, when in reality it's not their hardware at all. The above poster is smart to wait for a performance patch, but no mention of any of this in the main article is just terrible and may very well end up wasting people's money.

I've been having the same issues Elessar (Guest) has, and I've read many posts on other forums that this is a known issue, for the PC version in particular. The stuttering and FPS slowdown are game-breaking for me, I can't play it at all. My rig is only 19 months old, I'm running a Core2 Duo E8400/3GHz CPU, NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT (512MB), with 4GB RAM. There is no reason my rig shouldn't be able to run a game built on a souped-up Quake 3-engine, and run it well. This is a known issue that is not impacted by lowering graphical settings, though I obviously tried that at first.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't do a performance review of a game until all the bugs are fixed--as someone rightly pointed out, that would mean no performance reviews would ever be written. But a performance review is the one place I would absolutely expect to see mention of a widespread performance-crushing bug, and I see no mention of it here.

Excuse me as I am not "pc requirement savy", however I tested mine against Activisions requirement test and gamesystemrequirement.com and both said I could run the game. Unfortunately like so many others I am unable to play, much less get past the "Press the key" screen as I have crashed with the "blue halo" of death over the cursor.

Hopefully awaiting a patch/fix. Ironically I can play Medal of Honor Tier 1, go figure.

Vista 32
AMD PHENOM 9750 QUAD
ATI 3650

Ha running Amd x64 athlon 5200+ and gts 250 gpu i get 47-120 fps so how are these stats right they cant be and the game blows on performance and networking why not write a review about that oh forgot not paid to tell the truth.

Would be nice if you could toss an q9650 in the mix!

Thank you for including an X3 processor after asking many times.

Keep it up!

And what was wrong with the 4890? It's fps was miserable

I actually have an E8500 running overclocked @ 3.6 per core, with an HD 4890, and 8 GB of DDR2 on Vista 64-bit. I'm getting horrible performance on this game despite being well over the requirements. It really needs to be fixed badly on the part of the developer. It would appear the game was made for consoles, and PC was some sort of afterthought unfortunately :/

Very nice, thanks for doing this as always. And at 2560x1600 you really don't need 4x anti aliasing you show off's =P

unless you like stopping and staring at leaves and debris hahaha =)

I'm not sure how this accounts for the issues that I, and many others are having.
specs: e8400, 4gigs ram, GTX460 1 GB on a 1080p monitor
My computer meets recommended settings though still maintains 90-100% CPU usage at all times regardless of graphics settings. I'm currently playing on lowest settings, no AA, shadows etc... and continue to experience crippling lag.

GTX465 (which you missed...again)
Q9550 at 3.5ghz
4GB DDR2 at 945mhz

Eats the game with 1080p maxed out >~60fps easily.

Why do you keep missing the GTX465? It might not be popular..but some us do own it. We just haven't flashed to 470 yet...

Nice to see someone still uses their head When testing we ran into no problems at all. I have finished the single player campaign and did not run into a single bug. I have no doubt there are bugs with the game, though they never affected us. All cards and configurations benchmarked without a hitch with the exception of dual-core processors which run like crap due to being over taxed.

Either this game is too demanding for dual-core processors or there is a bug, in either case you cannot run this game using the highest visual quality settings on a dual-core, at least from what I saw.

Hey we only introduced the triple-cores this time because it made sense, the dual-cores didn’t perform well and the quad’s did so we wanted to check the middle ground

Also there was a typo with the 4850 and 4890 cards, they were mixed up, I have double checked the excel spread sheet and I made a copy and paste error sorry. I have double checked all the results now and everything is in order. Thanks.

You have a quad-core so I am not surprised by your performance. As for the GeForce GTX 465 I have addressed this time and time again. First of all if we had a card we would not include it as it’s not a critical release. Given that we include the GTX 470 and GTX 460 you can work out where the GTX 465 would be. The GTX 465 is a card that should have never been released. Finally we were never sent one because … well they suck and no one wanted to put their name to it in the end.

Why are you “guests” convinced this is a bug? We saw high utilization across 4 cores, needless to say a dual-core processor is not going to like this. You have an old dual-core processor and are experiencing the lag we saw, again why is this a bug? Get a quad-core and see if the bug goes away?

This is not the first game to run terribly on a dual-core, Battlefield Bad Company 2 does as well.

I have a CORE2 quad 2.66 o/c by 20% and a GTX460 running of Windows 7 and it runs like a sack of crap with this game. It's only just been rebuilt and flattened and should be able to run no problems but I often see the CPU running flat out, game freezes and anywhere from 20-90FPS when I say 90 it's not often and usually for a couple of seconds. There are major bugs with this game and in my opinion it's a no brainer don't buy the game your wasting your money till they fix the problems and don't by a server like I did, as I'm now paying to play a buggy/stuttering game with a poorly design Rcon and very little you can program! If you just want to sit there kicking people all day then the server is the way however if you want to buy a clan server and play as a clan or your mates don't bother.

I believe many people responding have failed to realize that these tests were only in campaign mode. Maybe there needs to be a test of multiplayer mode as well?

please i am begging you next time add a Q9650 too

It is difficult to accurately test the multiplayer mode without times demos. I agree though I think most do not realize its single player only performance.

i love how all the guests hide behind there no names and ***** at a guy who worked his *** off to give us this review give him some respect all the time he spent to do this is probably more than some of you work in a week.

Man, you have to have thick skin to work at TS. Nice review. Just got back from the weekend. Now off to crysis to run test for someone.

Definately gonna pick up black ops tomorrow. Looks good.

i heard black ops is nice haven't got it yet but supposedly even the most amazing systems have stuttering problems while playing must be a bug or something bu smash your system could chew this game up and spit it out like nothing

this game is garbage, i couldn't even finish it, in tired of the same old boring shooting gameplay. the good news? the patch fixes the performance issues ( works great on a my E6600 + 4770) but at 1080p this is butt ugly to me, the shadows just looks better at 720p because of their lower resolution. it makes no difference anyway, like y said, garbage.