Warzone low GPU usage

Many Warzone PC players have reported a significant hit to their performance in each Warzone update, so heres how to make sure youre getting the best performance from your system in Season 5.

Frames-per-second, or FPS, is an extremely important stat for competitive shooters. The smoother your game, the faster your reaction time, and the easier it is to track moving targets. This is why streamers and pros spend thousands of dollars on their gaming rigs.

Weve now hit Warzone Season 5, and the game has undergone changes, from the addition of the OP Combat Scout Perk to Mobile Broadcast Stations popping up around Verdansk. Although theres plenty to get stuck into, players are reporting serious FPS drops and stuttering in the latest season.

Unfortunately with Warzone continuing to update, the minimum PC specs might not be enough anymore. Every day, more players report an FPS drop since the beginning of Warzone Season 5.

Warzone FPS drops in Season 5

Since Season 5 started on August 12, Reddit has been ablaze with players reporting a significant drop in FPS. Reddit user BluCSGO said they have had a performance drop ever since they downloaded the update. The same issue was echoed in the replies and several other posts.

This problem isnt exclusive to a handful of users, with many players with top-of-the-range systems seeing extremely low FPS on Warzone. The game is becoming increasingly CPU heavy, so a good graphics card might no longer be enough to get a competitive performance from your system.

How to maximize Warzone PC performance

It appears that Warzone is undergoing optimization problems, with the game getting increasingly more difficult for PCs to run. Although many players are now struggling to run Warzone, neither Infinity Ward nor Raven Software has commented on performance issues.

In the meantime, here are some things you can do to ensure youre getting the maximum performance from your PC.

Use best Warzone in-game settings

You need to make sure youre running the optimal in-game Warzone settings on your PC. For Warzone, a good performance significantly outweighs high graphics; settings like Ray tracing will be extremely taxing on your system without giving you any competitive edge.

You can check out our full guide on the best Warzone settings for Season 5.

Use NVIDIA DLSS in Warzone

With the start of Warzone Season 3, NVIDIAs DLSS (or Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology came to Warzone. If you have an NVIDIA RTX graphics card, you can enable DLSS from the games settings which can give you a significant performance boost.

What DLSS does is lower your games resolution, increasing performance, but gives the appearance of a high resolution. NVIDIA says you can see anFPS boost of up to 70% while playing Warzoneat 4K.

To enable NVIDIA DLSS in Warzone:

1. Launch Call of Duty: Warzone
2. Open Options
3. Go to the Graphics tab
4. Scroll down to Post-Processing Effects
5. Set NVIDIA DLSS as either: Ultra Performance,Performance,Balanced, orQuality

If your systems GPU is struggling, then you could see a massive boost in performance by enabling DLSS.

Double-tap the Esc key

At the beginning of each new season, players have reported serious FPS drops at the start of matches, with the game reaching as low as 15 FPS in extreme cases. The initial fix for this issue was to re-apply your graphics settings. However, players have provided a simple fix for the issue.

If your games FPS severely drops, you just need to double-tap the Escape key on your keyboard. Its likely to do with the game believing its minimized, but many users report that this solution works.

Disable Windows Game Mode

Windows offers a Game Mode setting that many players have reported cause FPS issues. This mode is supposed to prioritize gaming, slowing down every other process. However, it can have negative effects on your PC while playing Warzone.

Game Mode is on by default so its worth checking if you have it enabled, as this could be a contributing factor to your FPS issues.

Heres how to disable Game Mode:

1. Open Settings in Windows
2. Search Game Mode
3. Click on Game Mode settings
4. Toggle Game Mode off

Rollback NVIDIA drivers

NVIDIA releases new graphics drivers to keep system performance optimal, but sometimes these updates have the opposite effect.

If youve seen a significant drop in your PCs performance, it could be worth rolling back your drivers to a previous version.

To rollback an NVIDIA driver on Windows 10:

1. Search Device Manager and open it
2. Click on Display Adapters
3. Double click on your Graphics Card
4. Open the Drivers tab
5. Select Roll Back Driver

If the Roll Back Driver box is greyed out, you need to manually uninstall then install a previous driver.

1. Select Uninstall Driver from the same menu, then follow the steps
2. Go to the GeForce Drivers tab on NVIDIA.com
3. Search for your Graphics Card
4. Install a previous driver from the list

Fix Ryzen/Intel CPU Warzone issues

By simply changing a value in your Modern Warfare folder in documents, you could see a massive boost to performance.

Modern Warfare can default to an incorrect value for how many cores your system has, which leads to FPS drops and stutters. Heres how to fix the issue:

1. Open Task Manager and select the Performance tab
2. Click on CPU and on the right youll see how many cores your PC has (e.g 6)
3. Open Modern Warfare in Documents
4. Select the players folder
5. Click on adv_options
6. Set the RenderWorkerCount to equal your number of cores
7. Save and Exit and you should see a marked improvement in Warzone performance

For more tips on how to get the most out of Warzone, check out our guide on the best audio settings for Season 5.

Image Credits: Activision