October 5, 2018 Treyarch has detailed plans for Black Ops 4 PC frame rate options at launch.
The Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Blackout beta offered one disappointment for PC power users – a frame rate cap. The 90fps cap was well beyond the 60Hz refresh rate offered by most displays, but it wouldn’t let you take advantage of the highest-end PC gaming monitors. Thankfully, the full game won’t have that restriction – but you’ll have to wait a bit at launch.
There will be no frame rate cap for Zombies or standard multiplayer. Blackout will be capped at 120fps at launch, and that cap will increase to 144fps “as soon as the servers are stable.” Pending further stability checks, uncapped frame rates will be enabled “within the first few days” after launch.
“During the Blackout beta,” Treyarch says on Reddit, “we made the decision to cap it at 90fps to monitor performance and online stability. The reason for this approach was that as a beta we had a lot of testing to do. It made sense for getting the game right for the whole community, and we were happy with the end result and the data we pulled from this approach.”
While stability has apparently progressed since the beta, the developers “still want to roll things out carefully.” It’s worth noting that we’ve seen excellent performance across the board – at E3, we saw Black Ops 4 running at over 160 frames-per-second on Activision’s demo PCs.
Even before that at the reveal event earlier this year, Treyarch’s co-head Dan Bunting told us the studio has wanted to focus on PC as its “own unique platform” for some time, and that Black Ops 4’s port is the culmination of efforts to “give PC gamers what they deserve.” Similar noises were made around Activision stablemate Destiny 2, which turned out to be excellent on our platform.
The Black Ops 4 release date is now precisely one week away. Today, Treyarch also confirmed pre-load info – you’ll be able to get the game downloaded early on Tuesday, October 9.