Framerate Drops When Aiming in Black Ops 2 PC? Here’s a Fix

Players jumping into the multiplayer and Zombies modes of Call fo Duty: Black Ops 2 on PC have been complaining about some serious framerate drops in the game. These drops seem to be happening specifically when aiming down the iron sights of weapons.

Fortunately, it appears there’s a fix for the issue, and it’s a simple one.

The trouble is with the game’s rendering of “depth of field.” When you look down the sights of a gun in Call of Duty, you’ll generally see that what you’re directly aiming at is in focus, while the rest of the image is blurry — that’s depth of field. It makes far-away things seem far away and makes the game feel a touch more realistic. Unfortunately, it also seems to kill framerates, and if you’re running a more average PC rig, this can be a problem.

However, Treyarch was nice enough to make the depth of field option adjustable in the Options menu. Go to your Main Menu, hit Options, then Graphics. Once there, you’ll need to go into the “Advanced” graphics menu to see the depth of field option. When you find it, knock it down to medium or low and you should see a drastic boost in performance when aiming.

You can also test the situation to see how your framerate is doing, which can help you make other graphical adjustments. In that same menu, set “Draw Framerate” to on. You’ll now have a number in the top-right corner of your screen that lets you know Black Ops 2′s framerate. Use that to try switching around your graphics settings to figure out what you can turn up and what you might want to turn down for best performance.

Finally, you might want to check your graphics card drivers to make sure they’re up to date. In fact, NVIDIA released beta drivers specifically tuned to Black Ops 2. Get more information about them here.

Crush the conspiracy with Game Front’s full Black Ops 2 walkthrough, with step-by-step instructions showing you how to complete each mission.