Hi!

Wasn't sure where to post this. But i've got the game Cod Black Ops for PC and alot of PC users are experiencing bad performance in this game.¨

In the config there is a command r_multithreaded_device 0/1 which is supposed to "Create a multithreaded D3D device" and im wondering if anyone know what this does?

Should people with dual/single cores leave this to 0 and quadcores set this to 1 to benefit? Im not noticing any difference in performance myself but i got friends who claim to.

The "D3D multithreaded device" is required when accessing the D3D device from multiple thread. It actually degrades performance slightly, because each D3D call is wrapped with a critical section.

If Black Ops would access the D3D from multiple threads (there's no performance benefit from that, but it is useful for streaming) this wouldn't be optional.

So, in short, your friend is experiencing a placebo effect. :)

Ok, thanks!

What Rattenhirn said. Basically:
1. If COD is using D3D from multiple threads, it needs to set the multithreaded flag, otherwise it's invoking undefined behaviour (I.e. it might crash randomly, render garbage, or even blue screen of death)
2. If COD isn't using D3D from multiple threads, then you don't need the multithreaded flag - and setting it will cause a performance drop.

The only reason to expose the flag at all is if COD is using the device from multiple threads, and you want to risk random crashes at the benefit of getting a small performance increase (Although the exact amount may vary, it's likely related to your CPU speed - higher CPU speed = lower speed increase), then you could set the multithreaded flag to 0/false.

But I wouldn't recommend it.

Did you get blops on steam? There was an update a few days ago that fixes performance problems (for some people anyway). It added a new graphics option called shader warming, you should turn it on if you see it.

Yep I did. The patch did help with some stuttering issues, but i still get really low framerates in the game.