As we noted in our recent review, Call of Duty Black Ops 4’s PC performance isn’t always great. However, some recent Reddit findings suggest the game’s PC problems may extend far beyond glitches and network issues.
Black Ops 4 potential PC memory leaks
A Reddit user named Kadaz recently published this post on the official Black Ops 4 subreddit. In their post, Kadaz present strong evidence suggesting that Black Ops 4 can cause memory leaks and even corrupt Windows. Indeed, Kadaz even posits that these memory leaks are why PC players are experiencing a high volume of crashes.
Kadaz performed some extensive testing to reach their ultimate conclusion that Black Ops 4 is causing a memory leak. Worse, the tests they ran eventually corrupted their Windows operation system, forcing them to do a fresh install. In layman’s terms, Black Ops 4 keeps writing and rewriting new temporary data until it ultimately crashes, or so Kadaz claims.
Within the body of their post, Kadaz even provides steps for other users to test for memory leaks themselves. Commenters in Kadaz’s thread are reporting similar issues, though some are also saying that memory leaks shouldn’t corrupt Windows. As of this writing, Treyarch hasn’t offered an official response, though that’s probably because it’s currently dealing with other problems.
It’s important to remember that Treyarch didn’t fully develop the PC version of Black Ops 4. A bulk of the work was outsourced to another developer, Beenox. Given how different console and PC architecture is, any number of issues can potentially arise. Still, if you want to monitor things for yourself, you can follow the steps outlined in Kadaz’s post.
Kadaz also notes that the size of your hard drive can affect how quickly you notice memory leak issues. A user with lots of free hard drive space might not even notice for quite a while. At the very least, you now have one plausible theory for why your Black Ops 4 PC copy is struggling. Take all such reports with a grain of salt, though, at least until Treyarch responds.