Black Ops III: 12 GB RAM and GTX 980 Ti Not Enough

Black Ops III: 12 GB RAM and GTX 980 Ti Not Enough (from TechPowerUp)

This year's installment to the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops III, has just hit stores, and is predictably flying off shelves. As with every ceremonial annual release, Black Ops III raises the visual presentation standards for the franchise. There is, however, one hitch with the way the game deals with system memory amounts as high as 12 GB and video memory amounts as high as 8 GB. This hitch could possibly be the reason behind the stuttering issues many users are reporting.

In our first play-through of the game with its highest possible settings on our personal gaming machines - equipped with a 2560 x 1600 pixels display, Core i7 "Haswell" quad-core CPU, 12 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card, NVIDIA's latest Black Ops III Game Ready driver 385.87, and Windows 7 64-bit to top it all off, we noticed that the game was running out of memory. Taking a peek at Task Manager revealed that in "Ultra" settings (and 2560 x 1600 resolution), the game was maxing out memory usage within our 12 GB, not counting the 1.5-2 GB used up by the OS and essential lightweight tasks (such as antivirus).

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We also noticed game crashes as little as 10 seconds into gameplay, on a machine with 8 GB of system memory and a GTX 980 Ti.

What's even more interesting is its video memory behavior. The GTX 980 Ti, with its 6 GB video memory, was developing a noticeable stutter. This stutter disappeared on the GTX TITAN X, with its 12 GB video memory, in which memory load shot up from maxed out 6 GB on the GTX 980 Ti, to 8.4 GB on the video memory. What's more, system memory usage dropped with the GTX TITAN X, down to 8.3 GB.

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On Steam Forums, users report performance issues that don't necessarily point at low FPS (frames per second), but stuttering, especially at high settings. Perhaps the game needs better memory management. Once we installed 16 GB RAM in the system, the game ran buttery-smooth with our GTX 980 Ti.

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Memory leaks. Memory leaks everywhere... :P

As a PC gamer, black ops 3 is the last game on the list. Honestly I'd rather play solitare than blops3 on pc.

Can't agree more.

But there are a tons of people, who buy CODs (its one of the best selling franchise) and this is a major fail...

Good thing I went with preordering Star Wars: Battlefront instead. That beta was buttery smooth.

Seems the same as the previous games. I got 8.5GB Vram usage out of Ghosts. I'm done with COD anyway.

If you pre ordered this then you get what you deserve.

#stoppreordering Click

There is a sequel called haddock coming out.

I haven't had any issues though. I just put my CPU priority on Above Normal and I get 60fps average with all the settings dialed up and no AA. If I drop Shadows to High, instead of Extra, the frame rate is always above 60fps.

2160p with 2x 980 Tis, 3930K. I do have 32GBs of RAM though and I have seen it go to 12GBs of RAM usage.

I really hope this post is satire...

@krazyorange: Why would it be satire? The beta ran pretty well considering it was a beta.

Dat quake 3 engine!

Played a bit of the campaign and also MP and smooth as butter here.

Most of us doesn't have dual 980Ti and 32GB RAM...

Although personally I don't expect much problems with a single 980Ti and 16GB RAM... On the other hand I have a 3440*1440 display...

I won't play it unless someone gives it to me for free though..

Looks like a boycott for now. Hope they suffer for it. And they promise modding lol. Asshats dont really give two craps.

This was the case for the last CoD game, or the one before it. Just absurd memory management. People with less than 16Gb of RAM get tons of stuttering. Thankfully, I have 16Gb so it was perfectly smooth with the settings cranked for me.

I was planning on supporting this CoD but...**** it. If it wasn't doing awful in terms of Steam reviews, maybe I'd want to split screen the online.

@Gamesterpheonix:

With my specs I'm running MP without a problem.

I normally play with all settings on High and AA off but I turned everything up and it still worked fine without stuttering.

As for gameplay, heaps better than AW. A lot more tight and controlled/tactical. With AW it was people flying through the air all the time.

Didn't you promise your coworkers you weren't going to buy this one? :p

And here I though the recommended specs for FO 4 were ridiculous for its AMD side of things. Damn, running this thing on any AMD hardware will probably melt it instantly. And this is coming from a current AMD user.

Why would machines with AMD have problems running it? Everyone complained about Ghosts & AW as well, I had no problems running both games (with and without Crossfire).

Ghosts or AW had the same problem but I never encountered it.. You'd think, they would fix this "over the years".

Amen brother.

They better have it fixed before they do the annual Free Steam Weekend.

CORRECT, but my COD itch got the better of me.

Punishment: I have to wear a pink "My Little Pony" Shirt to work 3 Fridays in a row....

Yeah, the Blops III beta ran really well too. Never pre-order anything on PC. How many times do you have to be let down before you learn? Aaauuugggghhhh!!!

Are that many people having issues?

I've been playing it for the past 3 hours without one hiccup. Everyone on there is saying they are very happy with the PC version (MP).

0 issues with AW as well outside of the prerendered cutscenes stuttering.

Good thing I don't feed Activision my money. Stopped years ago.

On the other hand people thought I was crazy telling them to get 16 GB of RAM. Now look :P.

In about 2-3 years I'll start recommending 32 GB.

Why do you hate cod ?If you don't like it just don't buy it.Personally I like CoD,I am a fan of the franchise.It's not as good as the old cod games but they are great.

Don't people need Win 10 Pro for more than 16GB?

but how are the visuals??? are the system requirements justified by the visuals or is it the usual BO (bad optimization).

i'm not going to buy the game but it's pointless saying the system requirements are too high without actually saying how good the game looks. videos and screenshots don't do justice because of compression and lack of motion, respectively.

this year we've seen great looking games running on not-so-crazy hardware like TW3, Mad Max, Battlefront. does the new COD look at least as good as those?

To be honest it's the best looking (and the best running) COD to date.

I turn down graphics in MP cause of lag but SP I have it on ULTRA and it looks great.

Not Witcher 3 great but in regards to COD level port, really good.

Check the Steam reviews again, mate. They aren't looking too positive.

@horgen: Microsoft predicted that Activision will have many games with memory leaks, so from Windows 8 and after the simple/home x64 editions have a limit of 128GB.

128GB will be enough till... Black Ops 4. Thats why Windows 10 Pro has a memory limit of 2TB.

ps: After the launch of Black Ops 3, Samsung, Hynix and Micron renew their contract with Activision. :P

Good prediction of them. Now I bet RAM producers are happy. I guess my next system will have 32GB RAM then... I always like having a little extra :P

*whistles while looking at the sky*. xD

Same here. I bought 16GB RAM, 2years ago. Actually I am always buying a little extra RAM since my first PC, 18 years ago.

I got 16GB RAM when I first build this system in 2012. Don't think I have used over 10GB though. Atm I use 3,6GB with steam open and just completed DL some games, one MS office Word document, Chrome with 15 tabs or so open. I'm surprised the usage isn't higher actually.

I just checked it, I am using 4,5GB atm, with Firefox using 700MB with 4 tabs, but one of the tabs has 3h interent radio, gog client, steam client, MSI afterburner and Real Temp for monitoring plus AI suite from ASUS.

But I think too that I haven't spent more than 10GB ever...

Are all those reviews for the campaign or do I have a special edition cause my MP so far has been flawless.

A friend bought it yesterday and he's running it on a GTX770 and doesn't have any issues either (he has turned off AA and Blur).

Maybe it was day 1 reviews cause a patch has been released since?

Does 50Gb is not a silliy enough requirement?

I'm not too sure, really. None of my friends bought it out of series exhaustion; I'm just going by what the people are saying on the Steam forums and in the user reviews.

I've got 16GB of vram, but I could easily change that to 24.
Anyways, thats crazy. That should have been fixed after Ghosts..

Pascal GP100 engineer sample spotted!

I'm starting to wonder then if the majority of those reviews are true or not.

A third friend installed it last night. He's running a 970 and MP has been flawless as well.

We have yet to try SP or Zombies though.

The game is a vRAM and RAM hog.

I have 2 970s and it is unplayable with extra textures.

It stutters every second.

I remember people complaining about Shadow of Mordor but I only experienced a stutter if I quickly ran from one side of the map then turned around to do it again.

In normal gameplay it was smooth unlike Black Ops 3 which is unplayable at max settings.

The extra textures are not even that great to warrant such vRAM usage, especially for a game that is not open world.

I wish they would add an option that would not load the whole level's textures into vRAM and RAM at the start.

I would rather have it only load in textures it needs at the moment and do away with what isn't being used.

I remember Black Ops 1 being just as bad but it was CPU usage that time.

Is that SP or MP? Cause in MP I'm not having any issues with stuttering.

Also, you should never advise people to pirate. In any case wait for a few patches, then try the game on Steam since they offer refunds now.

@RyviusARC: Yeah I would prefer that you didn't advice people to do such things...

@RyviusARC:Your SLI could be the reason it's stuttering. Try running it with a single GTX 970 and see if that fixes the problem.

FelipeInside just mentioned that two of his friends are running the game perfectly fine w/ GTX 770 & GTX 970 (as well as his GTX 980). So it doesn't seem like Nvidia cards are having problems running BOIII.

I agree that a lot of us in these forums, (that we have very good PC rigs) shouldn't even want try games, since it will play very well with maybe a few lower settings.

But there are people with near minimum requirements and they would love to see how their PC could run the game.

Piracy is not the solution at all, but I can't even advise someone to throw his hard earned money to a billions dollars company, cause they slack in releasing a small demo of the game and in the end he would not be able to play or to enjoy the game while he paid for it...

But then again, steam at least offer a refund of the game if you don't like it or it doesn't play. I don't know if origin does that too.

In my opinion they should start making demos again to all games. But this might prevent bad games from selling more and companies don't want this, do they?

Whatever he advises his friends to do, I don't really care about it, but no advising of piracy on these forums.

As for this game... It's up to people themselves if they want to spend their money on a game with technical flaws like this one. Although we were kinda warned about the previous COD game using up 8GB VRAM or so. They know it will sell like cupcakes anyway, why bother with proper optimization? Probably won't happen before it starts to hurt their wallet and reputation.

I don't think demos would solve this problem. A small 1-2GB demo shouldn't be big enough to cause this issue. It will reveal poor optimization, but if it is a single level, perhaps slightly cut down version of it... I don't think memory leaks will be that big problem.

good thing i have 16GB, but gonna save and try upgrading to a 8gb vram gpu in 2016

I said it too, piracy is not a solution and shouldn't be advised.

But there should be an US agency that protects the consumer from companies that sell crap products while advertise otherwise.

In every other market, if a company would sell a similar product, it would be called "defective" (or don't work as advertised) and company would be forced to refund their consumers.

This doesn't exist in gaming software and examples like COD or Batman AK exist.

And you have driver engineers (like those from Nvidia) saying that every single game now ships broken!

Some times makes me wonder what people that work at DA's offices need more, in order to legal move against them...

Demos in my opinion would be as long as they should give at least 5% and up to 10% of the game so it would let people play at least 2hours of the game.

I remember one of the first demos I played was Heroes of Might and Magic II. The demo had only one map but it was a lot of hours gameplay (I played like 10+hours). The result was that the next week I went to the store and bought both Heroes of Might and Magic I and II and the expansion of II.

Thats how a demo should be.

Now if they want to cheat and fix all the problems only from the demo, or cherry picking an area to demo, thats a misadvertisement of their product and as far as I know, is illegal...

It wasn't directed to you, more like a general warning, and if directed at anyone, the one who broke said rule here in this thread.

Well it would help with some kind of movement I guess... Or not.

DA's offices? I take it that is the name of offices for those who write laws..? I think they lack the technological understand and do not see the problem in their life. Good luck getting anything done though. There is a lot of money involved in the gaming industry. I wouldn't be surprised that if a suggestion came up with something similar to what you describe, game companies would use a lot of money on why this isn't a smart thing. I agree with you though, there has to be something to protect the consumers.