You could run around on invisible geometry. You could see the hitboxes of enemies as floating wireframes. The sun would be a raw coordinate value (0, 5000, 0). Killcams would show your character sliding on an infinite grey void. It was terrifying. It was beautiful. And if you tried to record it, 90% of the time your capture card would just show a black screen, because even the HUD wasn't fully initialized. We live in an era of 4K textures, ray tracing, and DLSS. Modern Call of Duty games load assets so dynamically that the concept of a "pre-GFX" state is almost obsolete. Everything streams. Nothing is truly "pre-loaded."
And somewhere, deep in the memory heap, your console is praying you don't ask it to render a texture before it's ready. code-pre-gfx black ops 2
Next time you boot up Black Ops 2 on your old hard drive, pay attention. Feel that half-second pause after the map loads but before the "Select Class" music kicks in. You could run around on invisible geometry