While it’s too early to sound the ‘Batman: Arkham Knight‘ port alarm, it’s sounding like Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will be needing a performance patch or two on PC.
Reports of very strange problems like ultra-low frame-rates in the main menus, random black screen lock-ups, and weird vibrating soldier men are rubbing shoulders with more conventional troubles; general optimisation and high-end hardware struggling in places where it really shouldn’t. As usual with a PC release that’s not an across-the-board experience, as some players are chiming in to say Black Ops 3 runs just fine.
But performance is so inconsistent for some, that certain sites have actively delayed their benchmark round-ups for the game until it’s possible to take accurate readings.
Treyarch have suggested a couple of performance-boosting tricks that players can try while they work on sorting out these problems.
The first involves good old config.ini file editing, and is recommended for people experiencing very low frame-rates on “certain i5 CPUs”. Pop in to your config.ini file for Black Ops 3 (probably located at ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Call of Duty Black Ops III\players\config.ini’ or thereabouts) and find the ‘WorkerThreads = 4’ value. Change it from 4 to 2, and see if that helps.
The developer also recommends setting your FPS cap to just below your monitor refresh rate, for better input responses. “If you have a 60hz monitor, you can try enabling Vsync and setting your FPS Cap to 58,” they say.
[Edit]: Treyarch have put out a quick patch which they say should address the i5 CPU problem, so the config.ini fix may no longer be necessary.
