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Call of Duty: Black Ops for Mac OS X

Based on 10 votes

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Developer: Treyarch | Publisher: Aspyr | Reviewed by Ninja Foodstuff October 12, 2012
First released: November 9, 2012 | Mac App Store release: September 27, 2012 | Steam release: September 27, 2012

Gameplay Video

Black Ops is an adrenaline-fulled rollercoaster of a game, so long as the technical issues don't get you down.

The long-awaited Nvidia drivers for OS 10.8.2 (driver version 304.00.05f02) are now available. Despite having been checking on a regular basis, it seems that they were quietly released about a week ago, but no-one picked up on it (though it probably doesn’t help that the Nvidia forums are still offline).

New in Release 304.00.05f02:

• Contains performance improvements and bug fixes for a wide range of applications.

Release Notes Archive:

• This driver update is for Mac Pro 5,1 (2010), Mac Pro 4,1 (2009) and Mac Pro 3,1 (2008) users only.

So the real question is, will this bring the much-hoped for performance improvements to Fermi and Kepler cards? Naturally, we did some tests.

With the original 10.8.2 driver (295.30), we got an LuxMark score of 1028 on our Nvidia 670. With the new drivers, we got 1067. Nothing to write home about, and still behind the Nvidia 570 score (of 1200).

But what about where it counts? We compared the drivers whilst playing Black Ops with maxed out settings, at 1920×1080. The results, in the video below, speak for themselves.

We’ve tested the GTX 570 and found similar improvements. Unfortunately the drivers don’t seem to be compatible with the MacBook Pro with Retina, so I expect there’ll be a further update at some point.