Call of Duty: Black Ops - PC General Discussion

heller said: Tonight the lag was even WORSE for me. It restarted my PC a few times and made no difference. God damn they better hurry up and fix it!

gdmatt said: Steam just downloaded an update and the Steam forums have some people saying it fixed the problem, while other still have it. I'll try it out now.

Skarteh said: Got some lag that time. Was totally shit
Be playing it tomorrow but no game night coz i can't rely on Steam to work.
Must be nearing the end of solo now. It tops MW2 but it's pretty retarded. Treyarch made the same mistake as infinity ward: forget they're not smart enough to make a smart game.
Gameplay is a bit boring now, enemies are so ****ing brainless, makes the gane feel very run and gun with no real skill involved. Kinda grown out of that now.
Also those "tap F repeatedly" parts make me want to dropkick the nearest baby.

desi said:

gdmatt said: Steam just downloaded an update and the Steam forums have some people saying it fixed the problem, while other still have it. I'll try it out now.

It didn't work for me, and hasn't worked for most people. I think it was a server browser update that may or may not fix MP lag. Doesn't touch SP lag, though.

mitsimonsta: No worries. The default multi-GPU setting was rather scary, given that there is no driver support for SLi or CrossFire for the game yet, and not everyone has two GPUs either.

Just a heads up on the 'actual reason' why the lag was happening (apparently):

Source: Identified the Lag Problem - Live Stats Streaming - FPSadmin.com

I spent all day yesterday trying to identify the problem here, and it finally came down to Black Ops Live Stat Streaming.

How I Identified it:

My friend was having big lag issues, even though he has a monster of a PC (i7), far better than mine, but was barely pulling 40 fps. I told him my puny Phenom II X2 was getting an average of 80-100 fps. He was as perplexed as I was, until I suggested he bring his PC round to my house and use my connection (50 down, 30 up). Once he was setup on my connection, his PC did much better, with an average of 90+ fps. So, we concluded that it was the connection - he had a meagre 1 meg up at his home, but with the 30 up I have at mine, it managed much better. Why?

Well, from the moment you log into Black Ops it starts live streaming your stats. This is why even the menus lag - it is getting data to display about game events, such as bombs destroyed, wager contracts made and fulfilled, etc, etc. This data is sent every 2 game frames, both up and down. It is constant.

How I Solved the Problem:

I set to work building a program that runs Black Ops in a shell, and wanted to block the port used for the Live stats streaming. However, doing that kills the game dead, as it "thinks" the stats server is offline, and it wont let you play, displaying a "our stats are offline at the moment please try later" type message. So, I "spoofed" it into thinking it was sending and receiving (with a null byte data packet) and that cured the lag. However, it meant no levelling up etc.

What I did next was cache the game data to the side in a holding sub program, and held it for 4 seconds (had to play around with the timing to find the sweet spot), then transmitted it. Bingo! We have a winner. Started pulling better than 125 fps.

All this informed me that this was the reason some people are getting lag, while others aren't getting it nearly as bad, and it all had to do with their up speeds - if you have a good up speed, the lag isn't nearly so bad.

What I did with these Findings:

I sent all this info over to Treyarch, and was pleased to hear they had been working on something similar. I was concerned I may have incurred a VAC ban because of the game shell, so they said they would speak to Valve for me.

desi said: Hmm well that explains the stupid MP lag. What about the SP stuttering?

iamtom said:

desi said: Hmm well that explains the stupid MP lag. What about the SP stuttering?

Wouldn't it be the same effect? Streaming data, etc.

desi said:

iamtom said:

desi said: Hmm well that explains the stupid MP lag. What about the SP stuttering?

Wouldn't it be the same effect? Streaming data, etc.

Well if I'm streaming data in SP it shouldn't matter, because I'm not using the net connection anyway. It would definitely matter if something like that was eating up everyone's upload bandwidth in multiplayer, though. I think some guy on the Steam forum reported that he had 60kbps upload while playing, and concluded that Steam was using everyone's installations as torrent seeds to distribute the game.

Maniaman said: Can they do that without permission?

heller said: Sooo the update hasn't appeared on my Steam. Can I make it look for an update manually?

heller said: Sooo the update hasn't appeared on my Steam. Can I make it look for an update manually?

desi said:

Maniaman said: Can they do that without permission?

Do you really read the EULAs that come with your games? Does anyone?