Black Ops 4 Stuttering & Low FPS Fix: A Step-by-Step Guide
Nearly every gamer has a stuttering horror story. You and your team are about to have a pivotal fight, where every moment and every shot matters. You rush to take aim when suddenly you’re met by a totally stagnant screen. Your game is frozen.
Your screen is stuck and your inputs are delayed, but you can still press buttons. You shoot wildly, unable to see where you are firing, hoping that you hit something. You don’t. You become the first gunned down in a firefight, helpless as the rest of your friends follow suit.
Stuttering and lost frames aren’t as big an issue if you're playing casual games. Black Ops 4—and COD in general—has never been casual. A split-second fight can mean the difference between loss and victory. Because of this, any performance issues can jeopardize both your team's success and your ability to enjoy the game.
WTFast knows that even the smallest details can affect your performance. For that reason, we’re going to go in-depth on what causes low frames per secon (FPS) in Black Ops 4 and how to solve it.
Understanding the Problem
Stuttering and suboptimal FPS rates are the final symptoms of a series of issues. These are likely universal problems that can also cause headaches in other games.
FPS issues come from the capabilities of your gaming device. Even top-of-the-line graphics cards and processors slowly deteriorate over time. The frames your games run at do not rely on the server but the power of your machine. It may be easy to equate lag with low FPS, but these are two different problems.
Lag is often used to describe perceived slowdown in any context, but it specifically refers to server-based gaming. Player inputs take a set time to be sent to a server, registered, and then sent back to a player. Lag is what happens when inputs and other data are not immediately represented on a player’s screen. This differs from dropped frames because it is more reliant on an internet connection than a powerful machine.
Lag and other setbacks are caused by latency. The length of time it takes a data packet to travel from the player to the server is called ping. The length of time it takes to travel from player to server and back to player is called latency. Effectively, latency is ping doubled.
When player inputs are not properly sent to the server, it can cause rubberbanding as the game corrects things. When your computer cannot handle the data sent back to it, it creates lag.
Internet speed, internet connection, and gaming setup are the three elements that can lead to these issues. The next step in solving your Black Ops 4 headaches is identifying the exact real-life causes behind your lag.
Step 1: Identifying the Causes
Plenty of elements contribute to dropped frames. We’re going to sort through the likeliest culprits to identify your current predicament.
Outdated Game Files and PC Drivers
Playing with old hardware is a risky business. As game files or PC drivers go out of date, the likelihood of problems cropping up increases.
Checking your drivers is easy to do by accessing your device manager. From there, right-clicking on “Network Adapters” and scanning for hardware updates lets you know if there’s a driver update to be had.
Corrupt Files
File corruption may be at the root of things. You need to uninstall and reinstall the game or digital service at fault to sort through this issue.
We would advise checking other aspects that may be at fault before uninstalling your game, though. At 55 GB, Black Ops 4 isn’t the largest game on the market, but it still takes a sizable download time.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is a finite resource, and online gaming takes up a lot of it. If you have a whole household's worth of devices on one router, it might be time to consider an upgrade. One router can only handle so much, especially if it wasn’t built for gaming.
Hardware
COD is consistently known for pushing limits, especially if you want to play on the highest graphical settings. It may be that you need to make a choice between graphical fidelity and your number of frames per second.
There is little to be done to account for processing power other than a direct hardware upgrade.
Step 2: Solving the Issue, Piece By Piece
There are plenty of ways in which your Black Ops experience can be tainted by lag and other issues. The above descriptions and your personal experiences should help you ascertain your exact problem.
Next, we’ll separate the solution into sections based on whether you have connection and speed or setup complications.
Step 3: Internet Connection and Speed
Boosting your internet connection is a great way to see immediate improvements. A tighter connection will lead to a more stable connection, ideally with fewer spikes in ping. While reducing overall ping is the goal, creating a more stable connection is far more helpful.
Ping is measured in milliseconds, making the difference between bad and acceptable ping or good and great ping microscopic. A player with a far lower ping may seem to have the better setup, but not if they have more spikes. A steady ping, regardless of what the number is, leads to a more streamlined experience than an unpredictable shifting delay. The following are ways to tackle both ping and spikes within a game.
Get a Wired Connection
Wireless connections are great for mobile devices where you don’t want to remain tied down, but less so for gaming. Wireless connections are slower and more prone to sudden interruptions from background interference. Attaching your computer to a router through an ethernet cable ensures a streamlined performance.
Get a Route Optimizer
There is little you can do on the fly to determine how your computer sends data to digital servers. Route optimizers fill that gap by actively tracking your connection to reduce the length your data travels to the server.
Update Your Router
If your router is constantly having issues and you can’t remember when you got it, it might be time for an upgrade.
Routers can slow down for a variety of reasons. Old age is one downfall as superior technology comes out, but sometimes routers are also overused. Using an exclusive connection point for gaming can be a way to bring peak performance to your Black Ops experience.
Step 4: Gaming Setup
Your gaming rig can be the perfect place to show your personal sense of aesthetics, but it’s also your connection point. Plenty of things can go awry, but fortunately, many of these are simple fixes.
Downgrade Your Graphics
The allure of ultra-high-definition graphics is appealing, but not all machines can run them. Black Ops 4 is also known for being graphically demanding, especially at its time of release.
If you have to choose between gorgeous graphics and an FPS rate that’s above the teens, choose the latter. Lowering graphics is the first step if you think you may have hardware performance issues.
Cut Out Background Noise
The stronger the computer, the greater our hubris. It’s tempting to leave half a dozen tabs open, including multiple streaming sites, without curating what we keep open. Unfortunately, all of these can be slowing down your computer. Closing extra tabs and checking Task Manager to see that you aren’t running unnecessary apps in the background can help.
Update Everything
Your drivers, games, and digital services receive periodic updates to keep them functional. Beyond this, PC components slowly deteriorate over time. With a current shortage of components across the board, now is the perfect time to hunt down other ways to optimize your experience.
Step 5: A Private Connection
Regular internet connections bounce data in a way that’s optimized for cost-saving measures, not speed. Private interfaces built for gaming instead seek the most time-efficient route for data when every moment matters. This allows for real-time improvements to your games to help make lag and other issues a thing of the past. The route your data takes is mapped out for you to see and then turned into its simplest form.
Optimizing your Black Ops 4 gameplay involves a lot of details that can be modulated on the player side of things. Other details are difficult to manage on your own but can be readily done through online services. WTFast offers private pathways and customer service to improve Black Ops 4 and a plethora of other fast-paced games.
The next time you load up Black Ops 4, you’ll join the game as usual. Your team will take position. You’ll charge into combat. And, with lag eliminated, the only enemy left will be the one on the other side of your monitor.
Sources:
How Long Do Graphics Cards Last? | Lifewire
Why is my PC running so slow? 3 common causes and how to fix them yourself | CNET
