How to fix Lag in Call of Duty (COD) Black Ops Cold War (BOCW)

COD Black Ops Cold Wars (BOCW) Lag fix – It is obvious that Call Of Duty BOCW is a AAA title and most of the AAA titles in 2020 have not been free from problems. Titles like COD Warzone had horrible performance issues during launch. People were complaining that were experiencing lag, low frame rates, sudden fps drops, every 5 seconds. It was a total mess. Unfortunately, COD Black Ops Cold War too has some of those problems.

While players who are using high-end gaming rigs are not facing as many issues, low-medium end users are experiencing some good amount of problems. That is why we decided to come up with a basic lag fix guide that will show you some simple tweaks that you can try in order to fix the performance issues that you are having. Here is how to fix lag in Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War.

How to fix Lag in Call of Duty (COD) Black Ops Cold War (BOCW)

Before you move further into this guide, make sure that your system is capable enough to run Black Ops Cold War smoothly. And that, the hardware on you PC is not the reason for the lag. Here are the system requirements of Black Ops Cold Wars:

• Minimum
  Experience : 1080p 30 FPS
  GPU : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 / GeForce GTX 1650 or AMD Radeon HD 7950
  CPU : i5-2500k or AMD equivalent
  RAM : 8GB
  HDD : 45 GB free space
  OS : Win 7 SP1 64-bit (SP1) or Windows 10 64-bit (1803 or later)
  
• Recommended
  Experience : 1920×1080 60 FPS
  GPU : GeForce GTX 970 / GTX 1660 Super 6GB or AMD Radeon R9 390 / AMD RX 580
  CPU : Intel Core i7-4700K or AMD Ryzen R5 1600X
  RAM : 16GB
  HDD : 45 GB free space
  OS : Windows 10 64-bit (Latest Service Pack)

Also make sure that you are using the drivers that have been specifically optimized for Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War:

• Nvidia
• AMD

Adjust your Nvidia Control Panel Settings (Nvidia users)

The first thing you should do is click on ‘Adjust image settings with preview‘ located on the left side under 3D settings and make sure that ‘Use the advanced 3D image settings‘ is selected. Now:

• Open Nvidia Control Panel
• Click on Manage 3D settings on the left bar
• Click on the Program Settings tab
• Locate Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War from the drop down menu under “Select a program to customize”
  
• If you don’t see the game on the list then click on the Add button and another list will appear
• If you still cannot spot the game then you need to add the .exe file manually.
• Click on Browse
• Locate the folder where you have installed the game
  
• Select the executable file or the .exe file which in this case should be Black Ops Cold War Launcher.exe
• Once you have successfully added the game, you will then see the program settings become available for the game
  
• Now tweak the following settings:
  Image Sharpening : Off
  Threaded Optimization : On
  Power Management : Prefer Maximum Performance
  Low Latency Mode : Off
  Vertical sync : Off
  Texture filtering – Quality : Performance

Adjust your AMD Control Panel Settings (Radeon users)

• Radeon Anti-Lag : Disabled
• Radeon Boost : Disabled
• Image Sharpening : Off
• Anti-Aliasing Mode : Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method : Multi-sampling
• Morphological Filtering : Off
• Anisotropic Filtering : Disabled
• Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
• Surface Format Optimization: Enabled
• Tesselation Mode: AMD Optimized
• Wait for V-sync: Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
• Shader Cache: AMD optimized
• Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
• GPU Workload: Graphics
• Radeon Chill: Off
• Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

Close Discord or tweak some settings

This is something I am writing from my personal experience. Discord initially gave me a really tough time when COD MW and Warzone came out. Every time I used to start Discord, COD games used to start lagging horribly. That is why we decided to use the Battle.net voice feature for communication until the game was more optimized. But if you don’t want to use Battle.net for communication, then you have to make few tweaks in order to stop Discord from reducing the performance of your system.

1. Launch Discord
2. Go to User Settings
3. Click on Voice & Video from the left sidebar
4. Scroll down to Advanced section
5. Disable “OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco System, Inc.”
6. Disable “Enable Quality of Service High Packet Priority”
7. Click on Overlay from the sidebar
8. Disable in-game overlay
9. Click on Appearance from the left sidebar
10. Scroll down all the way to the Advanced section
11. Disable Hardware Acceleration
12. Restart Discord

Use Game Mode (For Windows 10 users)

Game mode prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications and it also helps your system towards achieving more stable frame rates depending on the specific game and system.

How to turn on Game Mode

Here is how to turn on Game Mode:

• Press the Start button
• Click on Settings
• Select Gaming
• Now select Game Mode for the side bar
• Turn Game Mode On

Turn off Windows Background Recording

If you have Background Recording on on your Windows then it can cause FPS drops or Lag. Basically the feature constantly records in the background when you are playing a game. Here is how to disable Windows Background Recording:

• Open Windows Settings
• Click on Gaming
• Select Captures
• Now turn off Background Recording

Disable Xbox Game Bar

It has been a while since Microsoft introduced the Xbox Game Bar feature on Windows 10. Sadly it still causes fps drops in some games. I am not sure if your lag in Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War has anything to do with the game bar or not, but it is better to keep it off. Here is how to do it:

1. Open Windows 10 Settings menu
2. Click on Gaming
3. Select Xbox Game Bar from the left sidebar
4. Turn it off
5. Restart your game launcher

Windows 10 September Update issues

Some users are reporting that they are experiencing extreme performance issues in games after installing the Win 10 September update. The issues are happening to those who have installed KB4571756 (version 2004) or KB4574727.

If you are not sure whether you have already installed this update or not. Just click on “View Update History” and you will get to see all the latest updates that got installed on your system. If you see an update called KB4571756 (version 2004) or KB4574727. You have to uninstall it.

On the Update History window you will notice the option Uninstall updates on top. Click on it and from the list of updates installed select the one you want to uninstall. Right click on it and click on Uninstall

Wait for more performance updates

If you have played the previous COD titles like, MW or Warzone. Then you should know how the launches of these titles usually go. The release with a ton of issues that get fixed eventually. Give Treyarch some time and I am pretty sure that Black Ops Cold War too will get necessary optimizations like the previous COD games.

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These are all the steps or methods that you can follow in order to fix the lagging in Black Ops Cold War. One thing to keep in mind, none of these methods are advanced and are pretty basic. There is no guarantee that these steps will fix your problem 100%. If the problem you are facing is a serious one then the best option would be contacting the support. I would suggest that you take a look at the official Black Ops Cold War Reddit. You will find a lot of players discussing about these exact same issues.

The recent COD titles have been very unstable during the initial days after launch. Call of Duty Modern Warfare launch back in 2019 was a nightmare for PC users. Thankfully, they all became stable as more and more updates started dropping. Pretty sure same thing will happen with Black Ops Cold War.

• Check out this guide in order to fix crashes in Black Ops Cold War.

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If you think this guide had helped you then let us know in the comment section below. Also, you can check out the other Call of Duty : Black Ops Cold War guides on Frondtech. Good luck!

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That’s all folks!

Last Updated on October 15, 2020