COD Black Ops stuttering - can anyone help with some advice please

[rudirautenbach]

Guys,

Was given COD Black Ops as a gift, and have tried playing it on my "gaming rig" (which is now 2 years old...). It has a E8500 with 4Gb of DDR2-1066 and a ATI4870X2.

During gameplay I experience some nasty stuttering. There is a plethora of opinions out there if you google COD Blackops stuttering but the info, observations and advice is more conflicting than consistent. So I thought of asking help here.

One thing is clear, the game is extremely demanding on the CPU, and this is potentially where the bottleneck is. If I run the CPU on stock clock speed (3.16GHz) it stutters badly, when I overclock to 4.1GHz it improves quite a bit but I have a standard Intel CPU fan so the PC crahses after a while of playing, obviously due to a lack of heat dissipation.

Now I am definitely not going to upgrade a perfectly good PC to an i7 spec just for one game, and was looking for other (cheaper) solutions to this problem. I really enjoy the game (as with all COD versions) and want to play it, but need to sort this stuttering out.

What are your thoughts? Are there some tried and tested settings/tweaks on the graphics card (which is maxed out on OC'd) in terms of anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering etc. Or should I look at a non-stock CPU cooler (which may or may not sort the problem out).

For the hardware experts out there, the GPU is surely top-notch and I was thinking of methods to "shift" some of the load off the CPU and onto the GPU. How can one do this with settings, or is this entirely dependent on how the game was coded?

Help please.

Cheers Rudi

 

[Pada]

Unfortunately you cannot shift any more of the game's workload onto the GPU.

I've seen that CoD4's FPS also spikes when you're experiencing network lagg. Does your Black Ops also stutter in single player mode?
Unfortunately my copy of Black Ops hasn't arrived yet, so I can't say more than that

I would just recommend that you get a decent aftermarket cooler, but then you would requite a reasonable wide case.
The ones I would recommend are: Cogage True Spirit (cheap) / Corsair H50 / H70 (expensive).
There are quite a few other aftermarket coolers that are also quite popular, like the CoolerMaster Hyper 212+ [entry level] / ThermalRight Ultra 120 Extreme [high end air cooler] (which is the one I have, but it doesn't come with any fans IIRC).

 

[killadoob]

have you run the latest patch?
cod requires very little power to play, must be the game.

 

[rudirautenbach]

@Pada : Agreed, also spoke to others about getting a CPU cooler, the CoolerMaster Hyper 212+ seems a popular choice without the need for a new case and it comes with fans. Do you know of a physical store that stock these, as I would just want to double-check if its going to fit ok.

@killa : I looked for patches, apart from the auto updates through Steam I could not find any, have you got a link(s) to any.

I must say that OC the CPU made the biggest difference. I have not played online yet, just finished the game last night. This was a sight to see - having the portable A/C blowing cool air into the case, of which I have removed every panel...well it worked!

 

[EasyUp Web Hosting]

Check in the gaming section, this is a known issue with the game and will be fixed with the next patch, hopefully this week.