Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 minimum PC specs revealed, XP users out of luck

News by Brenna Hillier Contributor

Published on Sept. 3, 2012

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 may require you to upgrade your computer, if you haven't upgraded it since 2006.

Treyarch has officially released the system requirements for the PC verion of Black Ops, and they're reasonably modest. That said, Windows XP is officially unsupported, so that's bad news for a number of hold-outs stubbornly refusing to upgrade.

For those whose worries are hardware related, Treyarch wrote on the Call of Duty community site that it has "tested extensively on a variety of hardware" and is "very confident in the performance even at the minimum specs".

The developer is quite proud of the PC version despite reusing the same engine as the original Black Ops, boasting of "significant improvements" to performance.

"We’ve improved the way the engine handles multiple threads. Additionally, we moved the engine from DX9 to DX11. The DX11 API is leaner than DX9 and requires less CPU time to do the same amount of work. It is important to point out that this benefits the entire range of supported GPUs, not just DX11 hardware. We have also added more 'quality vs performance' options than ever before so you can customize your experience to either run faster or to satisfy your taste in eye candy," it said.

"Black Ops II PC features enhanced lighting, shadows, antialiasing, bloom, depth of field, ambient occlusion, and other enhanced effects that are still in the works. And the game can run at higher resolutions and higher framerates on the PC."

Additionally, there's no frame rate cap. At all. You'll have to set it yourself if you must.

Black Ops 2 hits PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November. Full minimum specs below.