Why: Overlays (Discord, Steam, NVIDIA/AMD overlays, Xbox Game Bar) inject DLLs and use VRAM, which can cause allocation failures.
How:
Also close background recording or streaming apps (OBS, ShadowPlay, ReShade, ENB).
Why: Older games sometimes need compatibility tweaks on modern Windows. Community patches can also address known bugs.
How:
If you want the actual best fix: stop using the Steam version. The community-developed launcher Plutonium rewrites the memory management of Black Ops 2 entirely.
Since Plutonium released, the "state pool" error has become a relic for those who use it. This is hands-down the better fix. Also close background recording or streaming apps (OBS,
Add to config.cfg:
seta r_videoMemoryScale "0.85"
This tells the game to use only 85% of detected VRAM, leaving headroom for the state pool.
Use DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) in safe mode, then reinstall the latest stable driver (not beta).
BO2 is a 32-bit application. By default, a 32-bit app on Windows can only use 2GB of RAM. However, a flag called Large Address Aware allows it to use up to 4GB. The game technically has this flag enabled, but modern Windows updates sometimes ignore it. Since Plutonium released, the "state pool" error has
Here is the better approach: We will manually override the memory allocation.
Find the file named config_mp.cfg (for multiplayer) or config.cfg (for campaign/zombies). Open it with Notepad.
Look for the following lines. If they don't exist, add them at the bottom of the file:
seta r_videoMemoryScale "0.85"
seta com_hunkMegabytes "1024"
seta com_soundMegabytes "256"
Explanation:
Save the file. Right-click it → Properties → Check Read-only. This prevents the game from overwriting your changes.
Delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\Activision\BlackOps2\shaders folder.
The game will recompile shaders on next launch (fixes corrupt pool entries).
Vanilla BO2 on Steam is not Large Address Aware. This means it caps at 2GB of RAM. The state pool corrupts faster in 2GB than 4GB.
How to fix (Better than using CFF Explorer): Since Plutonium released
If you use Plutonium: Skip this step. Plutonium is already LAA enabled.
Verification: After patching, the game can now use up to 3.7GB of RAM instead of 2GB. The state pool error requires ~2.5GB of fragmentation to trigger. This fix alone removes 70% of crashes.