Treyarch look to be doing their bit for PC technological advancement by announcing that the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 engine will be using DirectX 11. According to Treyarch, “The DX11 API is leaner than DX9 and requires less CPU time to do the same amount of work, [so] this benefits the entire range of supported GPUs, not just DX11 hardware.”
Good news for most, but if you’re still using Windows XP as your operating system (and quite a few do, as the Steam hardware surveys tend to demonstrate) you won’t be able to run the game.
If you do have a DirectX 11 compatible operating system, various graphics options are being promised including “enhanced lighting, shadows, antialiasing, bloom, depth of field [and] ambient occlusion.” You can also look forward to much higher resolutions and a higher framerate than the console versions. If, that is, you have a beefy enough PC.
How beefy? At least this beefy (these are the minimum specs):
- 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
Source: Treyarch
