Call of Duty Black Ops on Pentium 4

Hello everyone who clicked a title for this blog entry. This is my first blog, and as it is written in those big letter up there, I'm going to dedicate this whole blog to Pentium 4 gaming and my impressions on how games run on it + impressions of the games them selves.

So, to start off on high note today I have a game of Call Of Duty Black Ops.



PC Specs:
Pentium 4 (s478) 3.00GHz HT (enabled)
HP ch085 Motherboard
2.2GB DDR400 Ram
HD 3850 AGP Video card 512MB VRam/256Bit
160GB Samsung Hard Drive...
Windows 7

Pre-patch:
I double-click the shortcut on the desktop, game starts, everything seems normal for now. Intro starts and seems that there is some lags spikes. When I reached the title screen fraps was showing 7-10FPS, and it didn't get better after I pushed the Enter key. In main menu the frame rate remains the same. After spinning my head like an idiot in that dynamic 3D menu ''world'', I continued my journey to the single player. First thing I notice is that the loading takes very long time, after my patience-o-meter was at it's lowest point I finally got into the game. I was a bit disappointed, well not really disappointed, It was kinda what I expected. Even on lowest settings possible, there wasn't any enhancements, and after After struggle to finish first mission by noobtoobing trough a slide show of explosions and flying cars I turned the game off.
So those were the impressions of single player.
I'm glad to announce that zombie mode runs alot smoother. I was a bit surprised, zombie mode was actually playable, and even when there was some action I could still play zombies with success. I also found something weird about zombie mode (don't know if this works in single player), but when I set Texture Quality to EXTRA and Anti-Alias to x16, I actually gained few more fps.

Post-patch:
These impressions are after third patch. First single player, patch didn't made really big difference, more like no difference at all, all those special effects really put alot of stress on CPU and GPU.
Again zombies, after patch now you can slay zombies 25-30FPS, just keep the ''SHADOWS'' off.
Now the Multi player, yes, the main reason why you bought Black Ops. Not going to lie, you probably won't play it. The biggest problem is map loading, it takes long time to load maps, and when it finishes loading map you get disconnected with message ''Lost connection to host''. Sometimes you do get connected into the server, but only if theres a NUKETOWN map, because this map takes shortest time to load, and when you get into the multi player action you struggle trough playing on 5-10FPS.

In overall, the only playable thing in Black Ops is zombie mode, but that doesn't mean that it sucks, zombie mode is really really fun, doesn't matter SOLO or in CO-OP mode.

These are some changes to config.cfg I found on the Internet. Looks like treyarch tought thap people play on computers that have single core CPU's with dual GPU video cards (seriously?).
Open config.cfg (it's located in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\call of duty black ops\players folder), find seta r_multiGpu "1", change 1 to 0, then find seta r_multithreaded_device "0", change 0 to 1, save it and thats it, this should help a little. You can also do the same thing to config_mp.cfg.

Soon new patch should come out with these fixes:
• Added an option to create shaders during load time. This fixes hitching when viewing a new area of the map for the first time on some video cards.
• Incomplete server browser results.
• Improvements to Quickmatch results (with better ping and reduced lag)..
• /connect
• /reconnect
• Improved threading performance on computers with only 2 cores.

I'll update this blog entry after this patch comes out :).

UPDATE:
So the long awaited patch came out, and it is me who is late to update this blog entry. So did it do any good? Did it improve framerate? Anything?
Yes, and no, but that depends, I don't know is it my computer or what, but I now have 15FPS, but in adition to that I received few problems that I didn't have, like freezes, the freezes that had to be fixed, maybe it's only me, I don't know. It's always a good idea to visit call of duty forums, because some peopel say that patch helped, some say that it didn't...

Thanks for visiting my blog, stay tuned, next game Need For Speed Hot Pursuit.