Strap yourselves in and grab a big cup of Tea or Coffee (be gentle it's the first time I have wrote anything like this) 
With another year rolling round the inevitable Call Of Duty release cycle continues, and this year it is the turn of Treyarch who have recently become the saviour of Call Of Duty on the PC Platform with their refusal, as it would appear, to continue the trend set by the other 2 developers in Activisions development arsenal for Call Of Duty games.
There are features in the game that should be there such as FOV options, Frame Rate Cap options and more than just one or two options within the graphical and sound sections within the settings menu.
These features are expected in 99% of PC games and in recent years these features have been getting removed from PC games, in favor of making the games more like the Console variants I am looking at you Ubisoft (Watchdogs, The Division).
Black Op's 3 beta has surprised me quite a bit this morning, firstly I will get system usage out of the way since this has been one of the main issues with the previous couple of Call Of Duty games for me.
So far the game has run pretty smoothly at 4K @ High settings with over 120fps for the most part, with the occasional dip below 90fps and the usual micro stutter every now and then that I am now accustomed to with Windows 10 and two nVidia GTX 780Ti's in SLI, however I have capped the frame rate to 90 as it just feels better.
The frame rate cap can be set within the graphical options menu, within the section for adjusting detail settings.
The options to cap the frame rate are 30, 60, 90, 120 and Unlimited.
With the current nVidia drivers that I am running which is version 355.80 (Thanks to Dicehunter on OC3D for the download link), a few of the issues with previous Windows 10 drivers have been resolved, however all is not as well as it could be if I was running Windows 8.1, but hopefully that will be resolved as patches for Windows come out and nVidia get better drivers out.
MSI Afterburner was reporting over 4GB of Vram being used, which would be amazing if that were true however the nVidia GTX 780Ti's only come with 3GB of Vram, but that was fixed with a reboot, and now it's reporting over 4GB Vram usage which is still wrong but hey what can you do. It is also reporting almost 100% GPU usage on both GPU's when the frame rate is not capped indicating that there may not be a issue with SLI in this latest iteration of Call Of Duty as seen in previous iterations such as Ghost's and Advanced Warfare.
I have tested the game running at 1440p as well as running it at 4K and whilst the frame rate went over 200fps at 1440p with my current system which consists of a stock Intel Core I7 4790K, 16Gb 2400Mhz ram, 2x GTX 780Ti's, Samsung SSD and a Asus 4K Monitor.
The Vram usage at 1440p was still being reported as over 4GB and I believe this is due to a issue currently with memory leakage on nVidia GPU’s which has been reported on the nVidia forums.
System ram usage is up at over 10GB when running the game, so be warned if you try to play this with 8GB you might have a issue or two, although you should be fine as after a reboot the game was only using around 8GB. After a reboot of the system, the total ram usage dropped to 8GB out of the 16GB that I have within my system.
CPU Usage is running at between 30% to 50% most of the time, which is expected from a Call Of Duty title since the engine does not appear to be a multithread capable engine beyond 2 Cores.
The CPU I am running is currently a Intel Core I7 4790K @ stock speeds which would lead me to believe that anyone with a Intel Core I5 and above or a AMD Phenom II X4 965 and above should be fine for not only playing the game, but streaming to Twitch etc at the same time as playing from the same system.
Map loading times seem quite quick but I do have the game installed on my Samsung 840 Evo 500Gb SSD, so that does help somewhat.
There has been little to no input lag from the mouse although it will take some fine tuning within the settings to get this setup just how I like it, as there is 3 options for the mouse input that can be changed and those are:
Mouse Sensitivity
Mouse Acceleration
Mouse Filtering
So again Treyarch have included some settings within the game, that might not be necessary but atleast they are there and can be adjusted.
All button options can be changed on the keyboard bindings and if you choose to use a controller then there are the usual profiles, from Southpaw to Legacy Southpaw for the stick layout and then there are multiple profiles for the button layout from Default to Nomad, Tactical, Stick and Move and Bumper Jumper, whatever your choice Treyarch have you covered.
Keyboard input is pretty much spotless in that if you press a button, it does what you want instantly.
The sound settings are the usual within Call Of Duty games, so you have the option of turning of the announcer voice, music, sfx and cinematics whilst also being able to change the audio presets based on if you are using headsets or speakers etc.
The graphics section of the settings is split into two parts, you have the first section where you can change the usual resolution, refresh rate, brightness and display mode my Resolution Currently Is: 3840x2160 (4K)
This section also includes the options for Vsync, Draw FPS, Player Name Indicator, Splitscreen Orientation and also the FOV option.
Then there is the Advanced Tab which has the following options and in brackets is what mine is set to:
Texture Quality (High)
Texture Filtering (High)
Mesh Quality (High)
Shadow Map Quality (Medium)
Anti-Aliasing (Off)
Max Frames Per Second (Unlimited)
Volumetric Lighting (On)
Dynamic Sun Shadows (On)
Ambient Occlusion (Off, doesn't appear to aid the graphical look or hit performance)
Although there is not as many options as the previous two iterations of Call Of Duty on the PC, I honestly feel that the options that are there are fine and we are not really missing anything.
With all of that said I am really happy with the way the game is running especially at 4K on my system,
Now it is time for my impressions of the gameplay, graphical, sound quality, weapons etc and the overall feel of the game.
First the sound quality, this is as to be expected with Call Of Duty in that there is a little to much Bass but it comes through my Creative headset quite cleanly although, if I was to invest in a better audio setup it would improve.
You can hear footsteps around you and distinguish where they are coming from although sometimes in the heat of a gun fight you can quite easily forget you can hear them and, get shot in the back or side including point blank by the pesky shotgun users.
Overall the sound quality is very good although the bass could do with turning down a bit, but I may just do that in Windows for when I am playing this game.
Graphical quality is a typical Call Of Duty affair, in that it is a bit cartoony and although you can see that Treyarch have tried to get away from that.
They cannot do it so easily due to the nature of the games engine in my opinion since it's technically the same engine as has been used since to my knowledge Call Of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, but adapted, tweaked and added to.
The colours are bright and to be honest they look very much like the those found in Crysis 2 which in my opinion is no bad thing.
The detail within the graphics looks quite good for a Call Of Duty game and overall the quality of the graphics seem very close to those of Crysis 2, again which in my opinion is no bad thing as the Crysis games are known for being some of the best looking games in the First Person Genre on the PC to my knowledge.
What I would suggest though is that you do not run the game at a lower resolution than the monitors native resolution without, tweaking some settings in the game as a drop in the resolution can reduce the quality of the game quite dramatically.
Overall I am happy with the graphics and although they could and probably should be better for a game being released in 2015.
I do honestly think that at the moment if Call Of Duty was to have a major overhaul in graphical quality it would affect the game to much in a negative way and could potentially, harm it more on the pc platform that it currently has been due to the removal of Clan Support, Player Run Servers and a Server Browser.
Call Of Duty has been known in the past for not requiring the same level of computer components as the likes of Crysis and Battlefield in order, to run them pretty much maxed out with a solid 60fps.
The use of the same engine helps to maintain that same level of hardware requirements throughout the years, and helps those who are not fortunate enough to own the top end hardware to still be able to play a Triple A game.
The gameplay is pretty much the same as taking the better bits from Titanfall and Black Op's 2 and merging them in to the one game.
The "double/boost" jump is a lot better than in both Titanfall and Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare, and whilst it can provide a tactical advantage it's not something I find myself using all the time, apart from jumping up to a area of the map that would otherwise keep me either out of the action, or take me straight into the middle of the whole enemy team.
There is the usual 3 main key combat areas in the maps, which is now a typical Call Of Duty map design as all the Call Of Duty developers seem to think that the only people playing Call Of Duty, are those that are interested in competitive play.
In my opinion due to this it is actually harming the game overall because the maps and player counts within each gametype are too small.
I found myself today running around the entire outside edge of the map and not seeing a single person and even running around the middle of the map and there was, not a single enemy player as they had all been pushed in to 1 of the 3 main combat areas.
The weapons in the game are currently limited due to this being a beta but from what I have seen up to now, the main weapons of choice are the Razorback SMG and the Man Of War Assault Rifle.
I have been trying a few different weapons but I will keep my eye on the HVK-30 when the game releases as this seem to me to be a very nice weapon and potentially my main weapon of choice.
I won't go into the "specialist" weapons as I have not really given them much of try as due to the issues I have found with the beta, they are a bit of a struggle for me currently but with practice they should become more useful.
There does seem to be some issues with 2 people shooting at each other with the same weapon and one person getting the kill quickly, and with less bullets than their opponent fired but I believe I can cover that when I actually get into the things I don't like.
The overall feel of the game is one of smoothness for the most part and it does have that Call Of Duty feel to it. The time to kill varies quite a bit dependent on the weapon of choice and the range at which you are firing.
The game will cater those who choose to sit back and take it slowly and be tactical but it will also cater to those who prefer to just run in head first and shoot without much thought, as to where their teammates are and where the rest of the enemy players are.
Now the negatives, there is no server browser and it would appear there will be no rentable servers for clans to run and this is quite disappointing but not unexpected.
In recent years the Call Of Duty developers, seem to want to make the pc version of the game the same as the console versions, and fundamentally that has damaged the Call Of Duty community on the PC Platform.
One of the best reasons for playing games on the PC platform is, the ability to choose what server you want to play on be it one in the UK or one in America etc.
The ability to remove abusive players or those not following the rules of the server that are set out by the people renting the server for them to enjoy the game.
The ability to remove cheaters from the server was a major plus, because it helped to ensure that your group of players were enjoying themselves, and it built up communities because your server was clean and respectable.
The connections seem quite poor to what Treyarch said would be "Dedicated Servers" and it actually from the looks of it appears to be player hosted servers like those found in Modern Warfare 2, 3, Ghosts and Advanced Warfare.
The pings are pretty high, with my average ping being over 50ms on a 120Mb down and 12Mb up connection which can provide me with a ping of under 10ms in the likes of the Battlefield games and under 30ms in the like of Call Of Duty 4 and 5.
The hit reg seems a bit hit and miss and this I suspect is due to the lag comp and why earlier I said two people can shoot each other with the same weapon, and one will kill the other with less bullets, this has been a typical feature of Call Of Duty since the removal of rentable servers in the game and relying of Activision to provide decent servers with a sufficient amount of bandwidth to them, or the host of the game having a decent connection and computer.
Overall if this is indicative of the final product, then I suspect I would be happy initially as the beta is very good and although there are a few issues, I suspect they could be resolved with the usual day one patch that accompanies most games these days.
Here is a gameplay video of the game running at 4K.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp1NNq2zKJI&
So have any of you been playing the beta and what are your thoughts currently of it?
With another year rolling round the inevitable Call Of Duty release cycle continues, and this year it is the turn of Treyarch who have recently become the saviour of Call Of Duty on the PC Platform with their refusal, as it would appear, to continue the trend set by the other 2 developers in Activisions development arsenal for Call Of Duty games.
There are features in the game that should be there such as FOV options, Frame Rate Cap options and more than just one or two options within the graphical and sound sections within the settings menu.
These features are expected in 99% of PC games and in recent years these features have been getting removed from PC games, in favor of making the games more like the Console variants I am looking at you Ubisoft (Watchdogs, The Division).
Black Op's 3 beta has surprised me quite a bit this morning, firstly I will get system usage out of the way since this has been one of the main issues with the previous couple of Call Of Duty games for me.
So far the game has run pretty smoothly at 4K @ High settings with over 120fps for the most part, with the occasional dip below 90fps and the usual micro stutter every now and then that I am now accustomed to with Windows 10 and two nVidia GTX 780Ti's in SLI, however I have capped the frame rate to 90 as it just feels better.
The frame rate cap can be set within the graphical options menu, within the section for adjusting detail settings.
The options to cap the frame rate are 30, 60, 90, 120 and Unlimited.
With the current nVidia drivers that I am running which is version 355.80 (Thanks to Dicehunter on OC3D for the download link), a few of the issues with previous Windows 10 drivers have been resolved, however all is not as well as it could be if I was running Windows 8.1, but hopefully that will be resolved as patches for Windows come out and nVidia get better drivers out.
MSI Afterburner was reporting over 4GB of Vram being used, which would be amazing if that were true however the nVidia GTX 780Ti's only come with 3GB of Vram, but that was fixed with a reboot, and now it's reporting over 4GB Vram usage which is still wrong but hey what can you do. It is also reporting almost 100% GPU usage on both GPU's when the frame rate is not capped indicating that there may not be a issue with SLI in this latest iteration of Call Of Duty as seen in previous iterations such as Ghost's and Advanced Warfare.
I have tested the game running at 1440p as well as running it at 4K and whilst the frame rate went over 200fps at 1440p with my current system which consists of a stock Intel Core I7 4790K, 16Gb 2400Mhz ram, 2x GTX 780Ti's, Samsung SSD and a Asus 4K Monitor.
The Vram usage at 1440p was still being reported as over 4GB and I believe this is due to a issue currently with memory leakage on nVidia GPU’s which has been reported on the nVidia forums.
System ram usage is up at over 10GB when running the game, so be warned if you try to play this with 8GB you might have a issue or two, although you should be fine as after a reboot the game was only using around 8GB. After a reboot of the system, the total ram usage dropped to 8GB out of the 16GB that I have within my system.
CPU Usage is running at between 30% to 50% most of the time, which is expected from a Call Of Duty title since the engine does not appear to be a multithread capable engine beyond 2 Cores.
The CPU I am running is currently a Intel Core I7 4790K @ stock speeds which would lead me to believe that anyone with a Intel Core I5 and above or a AMD Phenom II X4 965 and above should be fine for not only playing the game, but streaming to Twitch etc at the same time as playing from the same system.
Map loading times seem quite quick but I do have the game installed on my Samsung 840 Evo 500Gb SSD, so that does help somewhat.
There has been little to no input lag from the mouse although it will take some fine tuning within the settings to get this setup just how I like it, as there is 3 options for the mouse input that can be changed and those are:
Mouse Sensitivity
Mouse Acceleration
Mouse Filtering
So again Treyarch have included some settings within the game, that might not be necessary but atleast they are there and can be adjusted.
All button options can be changed on the keyboard bindings and if you choose to use a controller then there are the usual profiles, from Southpaw to Legacy Southpaw for the stick layout and then there are multiple profiles for the button layout from Default to Nomad, Tactical, Stick and Move and Bumper Jumper, whatever your choice Treyarch have you covered.
Keyboard input is pretty much spotless in that if you press a button, it does what you want instantly.
The sound settings are the usual within Call Of Duty games, so you have the option of turning of the announcer voice, music, sfx and cinematics whilst also being able to change the audio presets based on if you are using headsets or speakers etc.
The graphics section of the settings is split into two parts, you have the first section where you can change the usual resolution, refresh rate, brightness and display mode my Resolution Currently Is: 3840x2160 (4K)
This section also includes the options for Vsync, Draw FPS, Player Name Indicator, Splitscreen Orientation and also the FOV option.
Then there is the Advanced Tab which has the following options and in brackets is what mine is set to:
Texture Quality (High)
Texture Filtering (High)
Mesh Quality (High)
Shadow Map Quality (Medium)
Anti-Aliasing (Off)
Max Frames Per Second (Unlimited)
Volumetric Lighting (On)
Dynamic Sun Shadows (On)
Ambient Occlusion (Off, doesn't appear to aid the graphical look or hit performance)
Although there is not as many options as the previous two iterations of Call Of Duty on the PC, I honestly feel that the options that are there are fine and we are not really missing anything.
With all of that said I am really happy with the way the game is running especially at 4K on my system,
Now it is time for my impressions of the gameplay, graphical, sound quality, weapons etc and the overall feel of the game.
First the sound quality, this is as to be expected with Call Of Duty in that there is a little to much Bass but it comes through my Creative headset quite cleanly although, if I was to invest in a better audio setup it would improve.
You can hear footsteps around you and distinguish where they are coming from although sometimes in the heat of a gun fight you can quite easily forget you can hear them and, get shot in the back or side including point blank by the pesky shotgun users.
Overall the sound quality is very good although the bass could do with turning down a bit, but I may just do that in Windows for when I am playing this game.
Graphical quality is a typical Call Of Duty affair, in that it is a bit cartoony and although you can see that Treyarch have tried to get away from that.
They cannot do it so easily due to the nature of the games engine in my opinion since it's technically the same engine as has been used since to my knowledge Call Of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, but adapted, tweaked and added to.
The colours are bright and to be honest they look very much like the those found in Crysis 2 which in my opinion is no bad thing.
The detail within the graphics looks quite good for a Call Of Duty game and overall the quality of the graphics seem very close to those of Crysis 2, again which in my opinion is no bad thing as the Crysis games are known for being some of the best looking games in the First Person Genre on the PC to my knowledge.
What I would suggest though is that you do not run the game at a lower resolution than the monitors native resolution without, tweaking some settings in the game as a drop in the resolution can reduce the quality of the game quite dramatically.
Overall I am happy with the graphics and although they could and probably should be better for a game being released in 2015.
I do honestly think that at the moment if Call Of Duty was to have a major overhaul in graphical quality it would affect the game to much in a negative way and could potentially, harm it more on the pc platform that it currently has been due to the removal of Clan Support, Player Run Servers and a Server Browser.
Call Of Duty has been known in the past for not requiring the same level of computer components as the likes of Crysis and Battlefield in order, to run them pretty much maxed out with a solid 60fps.
The use of the same engine helps to maintain that same level of hardware requirements throughout the years, and helps those who are not fortunate enough to own the top end hardware to still be able to play a Triple A game.
The gameplay is pretty much the same as taking the better bits from Titanfall and Black Op's 2 and merging them in to the one game.
The "double/boost" jump is a lot better than in both Titanfall and Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare, and whilst it can provide a tactical advantage it's not something I find myself using all the time, apart from jumping up to a area of the map that would otherwise keep me either out of the action, or take me straight into the middle of the whole enemy team.
There is the usual 3 main key combat areas in the maps, which is now a typical Call Of Duty map design as all the Call Of Duty developers seem to think that the only people playing Call Of Duty, are those that are interested in competitive play.
In my opinion due to this it is actually harming the game overall because the maps and player counts within each gametype are too small.
I found myself today running around the entire outside edge of the map and not seeing a single person and even running around the middle of the map and there was, not a single enemy player as they had all been pushed in to 1 of the 3 main combat areas.
The weapons in the game are currently limited due to this being a beta but from what I have seen up to now, the main weapons of choice are the Razorback SMG and the Man Of War Assault Rifle.
I have been trying a few different weapons but I will keep my eye on the HVK-30 when the game releases as this seem to me to be a very nice weapon and potentially my main weapon of choice.
I won't go into the "specialist" weapons as I have not really given them much of try as due to the issues I have found with the beta, they are a bit of a struggle for me currently but with practice they should become more useful.
There does seem to be some issues with 2 people shooting at each other with the same weapon and one person getting the kill quickly, and with less bullets than their opponent fired but I believe I can cover that when I actually get into the things I don't like.
The overall feel of the game is one of smoothness for the most part and it does have that Call Of Duty feel to it. The time to kill varies quite a bit dependent on the weapon of choice and the range at which you are firing.
The game will cater those who choose to sit back and take it slowly and be tactical but it will also cater to those who prefer to just run in head first and shoot without much thought, as to where their teammates are and where the rest of the enemy players are.
Now the negatives, there is no server browser and it would appear there will be no rentable servers for clans to run and this is quite disappointing but not unexpected.
In recent years the Call Of Duty developers, seem to want to make the pc version of the game the same as the console versions, and fundamentally that has damaged the Call Of Duty community on the PC Platform.
One of the best reasons for playing games on the PC platform is, the ability to choose what server you want to play on be it one in the UK or one in America etc.
The ability to remove abusive players or those not following the rules of the server that are set out by the people renting the server for them to enjoy the game.
The ability to remove cheaters from the server was a major plus, because it helped to ensure that your group of players were enjoying themselves, and it built up communities because your server was clean and respectable.
The connections seem quite poor to what Treyarch said would be "Dedicated Servers" and it actually from the looks of it appears to be player hosted servers like those found in Modern Warfare 2, 3, Ghosts and Advanced Warfare.
The pings are pretty high, with my average ping being over 50ms on a 120Mb down and 12Mb up connection which can provide me with a ping of under 10ms in the likes of the Battlefield games and under 30ms in the like of Call Of Duty 4 and 5.
The hit reg seems a bit hit and miss and this I suspect is due to the lag comp and why earlier I said two people can shoot each other with the same weapon, and one will kill the other with less bullets, this has been a typical feature of Call Of Duty since the removal of rentable servers in the game and relying of Activision to provide decent servers with a sufficient amount of bandwidth to them, or the host of the game having a decent connection and computer.
Overall if this is indicative of the final product, then I suspect I would be happy initially as the beta is very good and although there are a few issues, I suspect they could be resolved with the usual day one patch that accompanies most games these days.
Here is a gameplay video of the game running at 4K.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp1NNq2zKJI&
So have any of you been playing the beta and what are your thoughts currently of it?
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