COD Vanguard fps drops stuttering – This performance guide or optimization guide will show you how to get rid of some performance issues that are currently present in Call of Duty Vanguard PC.
How to fix fps drops and stuttering in COD Vanguard
It is obvious that COD Vanguard is an AAA title, and most of the AAA titles in 2021 have not been free from problems. Previous COD titles, like BOCW, had horrible performance issues during launch. People were complaining about issues with that low frame rates, sudden fps drops, and random stutters, every 5 seconds. It was a total mess. Unfortunately, COD Vanguard too has some of those problems.
While players who are using high-end gaming rigs are not facing as many issues, low-medium end users are experiencing some good amount of problems. That is why we decided to come up with a basic optimization guide that will show you some simple tweaks that you can try in order to fix the performance issues that you are having. Here is how to fix fps drops and stuttering in Call of Duty Vanguard.
How to fix
Before you move further into the guide, make sure you take a look at the minimum and recommended requirements of COD Vanguard. And also download the drivers optimized specifically for the game.
- You can check out the system requirements from here
- Nvidia users can download the latest drivers from here or via GeForce Experience
- AMD users can download the latest drivers from here or via AMD Auto-detect
Recommended drivers by Sledgehammer Games:
- NVIDIA: 472.12
- AMD: 21.9.1
If the latest drivers don’t get rid of the performance issues, I would suggest you roll back to the driver version recommended by the devs. I would also suggest that you turn on the FPS Counter present in the game. That way, you won’t have to depend on third-party apps to check your FPS
Tweak the settings in COD Vanguard to squeeze out extra performance
I have a huge Guide dedicated to the COD Vanguard settings. You can check it out, as it will most probably help you make a better decision with your choice of settings.
Do not use Nvidia Instant Replay or Windows Background Recording on a weak processor
If you do not have a powerful processor, then I would suggest that you turn off features like Nvidia Instant Replay or the Windows Background Recording. These both do the same job and might cause unnecessary stuttering in demanding titles.
You need to disable the Xbox Game Bar and Game Mode too.
To turn off Nvidia Instant Replay:
- Press Alt+Z [You obviously have Nvidia in-game overlay enabled if you are using instant replay]
- Click on the Instant Replay block
- Turn it off from there
To turn off Background Recording:
- Go to your Windows 10 settings menu
- Select Gaming
- Select Captures from the left
- Turn of Background Recording from there
Heavy background applications and services
Windows 10 has plenty of applications or Windows services that often tend to eat up a huge chunk of RAM without you knowing anything about it. As a result, people with low-end CPUs and low RAM capacity start facing stutters and freezes in almost every game. I used to face this issue a lot on my i3-9100F system. There could be a huge possibility that the stuttering is taking place in COD Vanguard for you, because your system is struggling to distribute Memory or Disk between the game and some other demanding application.
So check whether you have useless applications running in the background or not. You can also decide which applications you want to automatically start when you boot your system and prevent the useless ones from starting.
- Open Task Manager
- Click on the Startup tab
- Keep the applications that are important, Enabled
- Disable the rest
COD Vanguard doesn’t really work well with Overlays
Before launching COD Vanguard, close all the different overlays that you have enabled on your system. That includes Steam, Discord, Nvidia GFE, AMD. Overlays are known to cause stutters in many games. So try to avoid them if your system is not high-powered.
Preferred Graphics Processor (For Nvidia Laptop users)
If your laptop features an Nvidia graphics card inside, then you need to make sure your laptop is using that instead of the low powered integrated one.
- Just open Nvidia Control Panel
- Click on Manage 3D settings located on the left side
- Select the Program Settings tab
- Under “Select a program to customize” select Call of Duty Vanguard (vanguard.exe)
- If it is not there, then click on Add and then select it
- Now set “Select the preferred graphics processor for this program” to “High-performance NVIDIA processor”
Disable Hardware Acceleration is Discord
If you have Discord running in the background, then I would suggest that you do this:
- Open Discord
- Go to User Settings
- Click on Voice & Video
- Disable H.264 Hardware Acceleration
Disable the Microsoft Software Protection Platform Service
[Note : This is an advanced method as it involves making changes to the Windows Registry. Do not try this unless you have proper knowledge.]
This is something that a lot of Windows users probably wouldn’t know, but there is a service called Microsoft Software Protection Platform Service or (sppsvc.exe). If you have a dual monitor setup, and you pay close attention to the task manager (On the second screen of course) you will notice that a service called Microsoft Software Protection Platform Service keeps on popping up and starts eating a good percentage of CPU and Memory. This actually causes stuttering issues and FPS drops in heavy games.
If you don’t see any such process, then this step is not for you.
How to disable SPPSVC
So just open your Windows Task Manager and try to observe whether a process called Microsoft Software Protection Platform Service is appearing on the list or not. If it is, then you need to temporarily pause it in order to prevent COD Vanguard from stuttering. Simply clicking ‘End Task’ on the process will do nothing, as the process will be back again in a few seconds. So here is what you need to do:
- Press Windows+R keys on your keyboard
- Type regedit and press enter to bring up the Windows Registry Editor
- Now go to this location : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\sppsvc
- On the right-side, you will notice some options
- Double-click on Start and change its value to from 2 to 4
- Restart your PC
Keep in mind : This will disable Microsoft Software Protection Platform Service, but you won’t be able to use other Microsoft Windows applications like Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, etc. Also, you will get a message showing your windows is not activated on your desktop. When you are done playing the game, just change the value of Start back to 2. Everything will go back to normal.
Try these for now and let me know in the comment section below whether your issues got fixed or not. I actually played the game at maxed out settings on my RTX 3060ti, and didn’t notice any stuttering. You can see for yourself:
One thing to keep in mind, none of these methods are advanced and are pretty basic. There is no guarantee that these steps will fix your problem 100%. If the issue you are facing is a serious one, then the best option would be contacting the support. I would suggest that you take a look at the official Vanguard Reddit. You will find a lot of players discussing these exact same issues.
- And, check out this article to resolve connection or packet burst issues.
That’s all folks!
Last Updated on November 7, 2021
Shoaib, 30, is a simple guy who loves to play video games, and enjoys new cuisines sporadically. He has been gaming since he was 7 years old, and with an experience of 22 years, under his belt, there is not a single AAA game in this world, that he hasn’t played. Despite being a MBA Graduate he decided to follow his passion. And because of his love for gaming, Frondtech came into existence.