Fix Call of Duty (COD) Warzone Lag, Stuttering, Fps drops and Crashing

Warzone lag – Call of Duty Warzone is a free-to-play Battle Royale game that got released on March 10, 2020. This is the second COD BR title, the first one being Call of Duty Blackout. But Blackout is not free-to-play.

Warzone is a standalone title. So if you were thinking that you need to have Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019 in order to play COD Warzone, then I guess it is good news for you.

In Battle Royale, it is pretty obvious. It works like every other BR game. You have to survive to be the last squad standing while escaping the deadly gas in the swiftly closing circle with up to 150 players. The map of Warzone is the city of Verdansk which has multiple named zones and close to 300 points of interest. Now it is on you to drop on multiple locations and find out the spot that offers the best loot in Verdansk.

Now that the basic summary of the game is out of the way, let’s talk about how the game performs. If you were around during the launch of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019, then you should probably know that how big of a nightmare it was. People were complaining about lag, low frame rates, sudden fps drops, random crashes, and freezes constantly. It was a total mess.

COD MW does not have those problems anymore, but Warzone is a different title. While players who are using powerful gaming rigs are not facing as many issues, low-medium end users are experiencing some good amount of issues. That is why we decided to come up with a basic lag fix 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 lag, fps drops, crashes, and stuttering in Call of Duty Warzone.

How to Fix COD Warzone Lag, Stuttering, Fps drops and Crashing

Compare your Hardware Specifications with the System Requirements of the game

Believe it or not, the System requirements of Call of Duty Warzone and Call of Duty Modern Warfare are the same. Here are the System Requirements of COD Warzone:

Minimum

Experience : 1080p 30 FPS
GPU : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 / GeForce GTX 1650
CPU : i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300
RAM : 8 GB
HDD : 175 GB free space
OS : Win 7 SP1 64-bit

Recommended (W/ Ray Tracing)

Experience : 1080p 60 FPS with Ray Tracing
GPU : NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
CPU : Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen R5 1600X
RAM : 12 GB
HDD : 175 GB free space
OS : Windows 10 64-bit

High/Competitive

Experience : 1920×1080 144 FPS
GPU : GeForce GTX 1080 / RTX 2070 SUPER
CPU : i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 1800X
RAM : 16 GB
HDD : 175 GB free space
OS : Windows 10 64-bit

Ultra

Experience : 4K 60 FPS with Ray Tracing
GPU : NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
CPU : Intel i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 2700X
RAM : 16 GB
HDD : 175 GB free space
OS : Windows 10 64-bit

If you have problems running Call of Duty Modern Warfare, then you will have problems running Warzone as well. You need a GTX 1650 to play the game on 1080p at 30 fps. But playing a BR game at 30 fps is not a good idea if you ask me.

Though Warzone is a free-to-play BR title, but it is way heavier than other free-to-play BR games like Apex Legends or Fortnite. Neither was COD Blackout less demanding nor is Warzone. So check thoroughly.

Update your Graphics Card drivers

Both Nvidia and AMD have released multiple drivers optimized for Call of Duty Modern Warfare till date. So if you have not updated your graphics drivers yet, then this is the perfect time to do so. You can download them from the links given below:

Figure out the best combination of graphics settings for your PC

We are still fiddling with the graphics settings of Warzone and will update this article with a good combination soon. Till then, just set everything to low. Here are the specifications of our test rig:

CPU : Intel i3 8100
GPU : MSI GTX 1050 ti 4 GB
RAM : 16 GB DDR4 2400mhz
HDD : 1 TB 7200 rpm
Monitor Resolution : 1920×1080 144hz

We are trying to take the fps close to 80.

Update : Here is our Call of Duty Warzone best graphics settings guide. Try it out.

Adjust your Nvidia Control Panel Settings (Nvidia users)

The first thing you should do is click on ‘Adjust image settings with preview‘ located on the left side under 3D settings and make sure that ‘Use the advanced 3D image settings‘ is selected. Now:

Open Nvidia Control Panel
Click on Manage 3D settings on the left bar
Click on Global Settings
Now tweak the following settings:
Image Sharpening : Off
Threaded Optimization : On
Power Management : Prefer Maximum Performance
Low Latency Mode : Off
Texture filtering – Quality : Performance

Adjust your AMD Control Panel Settings (Radeon users)

Click on Global Graphics.

Radeon Anti-Lag : Disabled
Radeon Boost : Disabled
Image Sharpening : Off
Anti-Aliasing Mode : Use Application settings
Anti-aliasing Method : Multi-sampling
Morphological Filtering : Off
Anisotropic Filtering : Disabled
Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
Surface Format Optimization: Enabled
Tesselation Mode: AMD Optimized
Wait for V-sync: Off
OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
Shader Cache: AMD optimized
Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
GPU Workload: Graphics
Radeon Chill: Off
Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

Close Discord or tweak some settings

This is something I am writing from my personal experience. Discord initially gave me a really tough time when COD MW came out. Every time I used to start Discord, COD used to start lagging horribly. That is why we decided to use the Battle.net voice feature for communication until the game was more optimized. But if you don’t want to use Battle.net for communication, then you have to make few tweaks in order to stop Discord from reducing the performance of your system.

Launch Discord
Go to User Settings
Click on Voice & Video from the left sidebar
Scroll down to Advanced section
Disable “OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco System, Inc.”
Disable “Enable Quality of Service High Packet Priority”
Click on Overlay from the sidebar
Disable in-game overlay
Click on Appearance from the left sidebar
Scroll down all the way to the Advanced section
Disable Hardware Acceleration
Restart Discord

Scan and repair the game

Battle.net launcher users have the feature to scan and repair a game available on the launcher. Same goes with COD Warzone. This feature will verify the in-game files of the game and download the missing ones. Here is how to do it:

Launch Battle.net
Select Call of Duty Warzone from the left sidebar
Click on Options
Select Scan and Repair
Wait for the process to be done
Restart the launcher

Buggy Windows 10 updates

Microsoft released an update for Windows 10 a few days ago called KB4535996. The KB4535996 cumulative update for Windows 10 heavily buggy and is causing a lot of problems for Windows users. Here is how the update looks like.

If you are not sure whether you have already installed this update or not. Just click on “View Update History” and you will get to see all the latest updates that got installed on your system. If you see an update called KB4535996. You have to uninstall it.

On the Update History window, you will notice the option Uninstall updates on top. Click on it and from the list of updates installed select the one you want to uninstall. Right click on it and click on Uninstall.

Let me make one thing clear, none of these methods are advanced and are pretty basic. There is no guarantee that these steps will fix your problem 100%. If the problem you are facing is a serious one, then the best option would be contacting the support. You can also check out the reddit page of COD Warzone. You will find a lot of people discussing their problems there.

If you think this guide had helped you, then let us know in the comment section below. Also, If you are facing problems that are not mentioned on this article then also you can comment below. We will try to come out with a fix. Good luck!

That’s all folks!

Last Updated on October 26, 2022

Shoaib

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.