Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 PC graphical upgrades detailed

The PC edition of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 certainly seems the finest, technologically at least. A range of shiny graphical improvements offered by the DirectX 11-supporting engine on PC were revealed over the weekend, joining the previously confirmed dedicated server support to make it sound pleasing pleasant.

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The PC edition of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 certainly seems the finest, technologically at least. A range of shiny graphical improvements offered by the DirectX 11-supporting engine on PC were revealed over the weekend, joining the previously confirmed dedicated server support to make it sound pleasing pleasant.

The PC edition packs "enhanced lighting, shadows, antialiasing, bloom, depth of field, ambient occlusion, and other enhanced effects that are still in the works," the blog post explains. Naturally, it can run in higher resolutions and has an uncapped framerate.

Treyarch has revamped the engine to be faster too. Multithreading is improved, and it's jumped to the faster DirectX 11. "The DX11 API is leaner than DX9 and requires less CPU time to do the same amount of work," Treyarch says. "It is important to point out that this benefits the entire range of supported GPUs, not just DX11 hardware." Plus it offers more visual options to tweak.

Cod Blops 2 is coming to PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on November 23, with a Wii U version rumoured and inevitable really. Here are the newly-revealed PC system requirements:

  • CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E8200 2.66 GHz or AMD Phenom X3 8750 2.4 GHz

  • Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 8800GT 512 MB or ATI Radeon HD 3870 512 MB

  • Memory: 2GB for 32-bit OS or 4GB for 64-bit OS

  • OS: Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7

From The Chatty
  • reply
    September 4, 2012 6:00 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 PC graphical upgrades detailed.

    The PC edition of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 certainly seems the finest, technologically at least. A range of shiny graphical improvements offered by the DirectX 11-supporting engine on PC were revealed over the weekend, joining the previously confirmed dedicated server support to make it sound pleasing pleasant.

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      September 4, 2012 6:12 AM

      ALL ROOK SAME

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      September 4, 2012 6:36 AM

      OMG! \m/ awesome stuff.

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      September 4, 2012 7:34 AM

      About time, kill XP support, DX11. I'm excited. PC should get more eye candy than consoles, maybe people will start coming back to the superior platform and leave the RRoD_box... I'm going to preorder this to show I support everything I read there. f*ck yea, the PC is back!

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      September 4, 2012 7:47 AM

      Isn't Treyarch the one that makes the bad CoD games?

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        September 4, 2012 12:59 PM

        what? I loved WaW, and I enjoyed BLOPS enough, its MW2 and 3 that I never took too.

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      September 4, 2012 7:48 AM

      Man, it's the same engine as modern warfare 1 with some dx11 effects smeared on top, that's it! Really getting tired of this engine. I understand it's a lot of work to re-create a development pipeline with new engine but cmon, it's been 10+ years. Give us a new goddamn engine.

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        September 4, 2012 9:15 AM

        I imagine that's likely in the works for new consoles. From all we've heard, new consoles are likely to be out within a couple years, so this could very well be the last CoD on this console gen (although I'm personally hedging my bets on a 2014 launch for the new Xbox and PS).

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      September 4, 2012 8:09 AM

      Same garbage... new shit colored polish...

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      September 4, 2012 9:04 AM

      We'll see if those "additional graphics options on PC" pan out; on CoD:BLOPS1, the PC graphics options didn't look too different than CoD:WaW. To adjust single-player FOV, one had to edit the config file directly, though at least Treyarch allowed this.

      This news item reminds me of Intro to C class, where the professor gave us an example of ASM to call an MMX SIMD instruction to perform parallel adding to a number of variables. Could we have done the same with C? Yes, though it would've taken more instructions. However, our executable was one that required MMX. Was it a versatile usage of MMX instructions? Not really; we were still learning programming concepts, so it was a stepping stone, though nowhere near as advanced as some of the sound and visualization programs I had that required MMX to process tons of stuff. I feel almost the same way about BLOPS2: they seem to be adding DX11 partially as a bullet point, and partially to speed up some rendering techniques, but at the end of the day, they still have to maintain feature parity with the 360 and PS3 versions, and it's going to be for a 6-hour Baysplosionfest amalgmation of the Call of Duty formula, with multiplayer that straddles the line between following the CoD formula too closely and alienating it altogether.

      I think back to wunderbred's lamentation of there not being any solid story-driven FPSes, and of them taking over 4 years to properly develop. Add in that the balancing of a multiplayer FPS is a task that is best taken gradually with an open schedule for balance fixes, and I grow even wearier of the Call of Duty formula, and how far it's fallen from the days of CoD1, CoD2, and CoD4. I'll have to pass on BLOPS2, not out of rage, but out of ennui.

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      September 4, 2012 9:16 AM

      Holy fuck what? An ACTIVISION game that actually isn't a shit PC port! I'm all ears!

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      September 4, 2012 11:43 AM

      Jumping on that sleeping dogs trail huh?

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