World War Z Performance Guide – Lag, FPS Drops, Crashing And Stuttering – How To Fix

World War Z is a cooperative third-person zombie shooter by Focus Home Interactive. The game is inspired by the incredibly popular Paramount Pictures property with the same name – World War Z.

It is true that Saber Interactive has managed to make a great game that has huge potential. But as of now, World War Z has a lot of problems. There are plenty of performance issues in the game at the moment. Players are experiencing problems like low fps, lag, fps drops. Some are experiencing frequent crashing and freezing. Overall we can say that the launch of World War Z has not been a great one.

There are a lot of issues that needs to be fixed but we cannot wait for the developers to respond because we have no idea about how much time they are going to take to solve all these problems. So we went ahead and came up with few methods to fix some of the ongoing problems in World War Z. Here is how to fix lag, fps drops, crashing and freezing in World War Z:

How to fix lag, fps drops, crashing and stuttering in World War Z

Make sure your PC atleast meets the minimum system requirements of World War Z

Minimum Requirements Recommended
CPU: Core i3-3220/AMD A10-5700 CPU:Intel Core i7-3970 @ 3.50GHz
RAM: 8 GB RAM: 16 GB
OS: Windows 7 and later OS: 64 bit Windows 10, DX11
Video Card: GTX 650Ti/ Intel 630/ Radeon HD 5870 Video Card: GeForce GTX 960 / Radeon R9 280
Storage: 35 GB Storage: 35 GB

Now there is a problem. We tried running World War Z on a GTX 960 at Medium-High settings. But the game was struggling too hard. It could barely reach 40 fps and the stuttering was too much to handle. Either the game is not optimised properly or it needs better hardware. So we think that the given official system requirements for World War Z is highly inaccurate.

So we went ahead and ran World War Z on a PC with a GTX 1050 ti and i3 8100. The game wasn’t struggling as much as before but it could barely manage to keep 60 fps even at Medium-High settings. But we did get an average FPS of around 57 fps.

Therefore, here are the minimum and recommended system requirements for World War Z recommended by Frondtech:

Minimum Requirements Recommended
CPU: Core i3 8100 / Ryzen 3 1300x
CPU: i5 8400 / Ryzen 5 1600
RAM: 8 GB RAM: 16 GB
OS: Windows 7 and later OS: 64 bit Windows 10, DX11
Video Card: GTX 1050 / AMD RX 460 Video Card: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD RX 580
Storage: 35 GB Storage: 35 GB

Make sure your graphics drivers are updated

Outdated drivers could be the reason of performance loss at times. Updating our GeForce game ready driver to v425.31 reduced the fps drops in World War Z quite a bit. Here are the links to the latest drivers for AMD and Nvidia graphics cards:

  1. Nvidia Drivers
  2. AMD Drivers

Best video or graphics settings for World War Z

Here is our detailed guide to Best Graphics or Video settings for World War Z. The guide will give you every detail about the combination of settings we have chosen for World War Z and will also show you benchmarks for the settings as well.

Tweak settings for World War Z from the Nvidia Control Panel

[Note: This is for Nvidia users only]

  • Open Nvidia Control Panel
  • Click on Manage 3D settings on the left bar
  • Click on the Program Settings tab
  • Locate World War Z from the drop down menu under “Select a program to customize”
  • If you cannot find it on the list then you need to add the .exe file manually
  • Click on Add
  • Locate the folder where you have installed World War Z
  • Select the executable file or the .exe file which in this case should be wwzretailegs.exe
  • Once added the program settings will now be available for WWZ
  • Set Monitor Technology to G-Snyc (if available)
  • Set Maximum pre-rendered frames to 2
  • Enable Threaded Optimization
  • Set Power Management to Highest Performance
  • Set Multi-Display/Mixed GPU Acceleration to Single display performance mode
  • Change Texture filtering – Quality to Performance

Increase the Priority of World War Z from the Task Manager

  • Launch World War Z via Epic games launcher
  • Press Alt+Tab to minimize the game
  • Open Task Manager
  • Click on Details tab
  • Search for the process WWZ or wwzretailegs for the list
  • Right click on the process and Set Priority to High

Close all overclocking applications

Close any kind of overclocking utility or application that is running on your PC. Overclocking applications like the MSI Afterburner and Zotac Firestorm, are causing crashes for a lot of games. Sadly, World War Z is one of them.

We tried running World War Z benchmarks with our GTX 1050 ti overclock just a little bit, but the game ended up crashing after a while during every test. After we closed MSI Afterburner and reset the core clock and memory clock back to default, everything went back to normal, and we managed to run the tests without any issue. So it is better to stay on the safe side and run your graphics card and CPU at their default clock speeds as they are more stable.

You are good to go!


That’s all folks!

Last Updated on March 15, 2024