Right after wrapping up Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare 2 settings guide, it was only natural for me to come up with the Warzone 2 best settings to give you that amazing combination of performance and visuals to get you ready for Season 3.
I have tested the game on the following PC specifications:
- System: Lenovo Legion 7i Laptop
- CPU: Intel i7-11800H
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3070 8GB
- RAM: 32GB DDR4
- Storage: Samsung 1TB SSD Gen 4
Before jumping into configuring your settings, I recommend performing the fixes below:
Warzone 2 requires an Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 for CPU, NVIDIA GTX 960 or AMD Radeon RX 470 as GPU and 8 GB of RAM to run properly on your PC.
These are the settings that have the most impact on your PC, both visually and performance-wise:
- Level of Detail Nearby & Distance
- Clutter Draw Distance
- Particle Quality Level
- Tesselation
- Steaming & Volumetric Quality
- Screen Space Reflections
- Static Reflection Quality
- Ambient Occlusion
- Particle Lighting
- Shadow Map and Spot Shadow Quality
Call of Duty Warzone 2 latest season just started and the game is in much better shape than it was back when it was first released. It’s smoother, more responsive, and definitely has much fewer bugs than the initial launch. However, there are several settings that you should tweak in order to get the best FPS.
Call of Duty Warzone 2 Best Graphics Settings
I’ve run Call of Duty Warzone 2 on my setup with an RTX 3070, and the game runs perfectly fine. Since the optimization is decent, with only a few hitches here and there, I am sure you won’t have any problems running the game either.
So, let’s start optimizing your Warzone 2 best graphics settings and boost your in-game performance.
Display
| Display Mode | Fullscreen Exclusive |
| Screen Refresh Rate | Auto |
| Display Resolution | Native |
| Dynamic Resolution | Off |
| Aspect Ratio | Auto |
| V-Sync | Off |
| Customer Frame Rate Limit | Custom – 120 |
| Restart Shaders Optimization | Enabled |
The first set of graphics settings is the Display Settings. These settings contain the basic visual settings you’ll need to configure to help Warzone 2 decide how it will run on your PC.
Quality
| Render Resolution | 100 |
| Upscaling / Sharpening | NVIDIA DLSS / AMD FSR |
| Anti-Aliasing | SMAA T2X |
| Anti-Aliasing Quality | Medium |
| Video Memory Scale | 85 |
| Texture Resolution | Low – High |
| Texture Filter Anisotropic | High |
| Level of Detail Nearby & Distant | Low |
| Clutter Draw Distance | Short |
| Particle Quality | High |
| Particle Quality Level | Low |
| Bullet Impact & Spray | Personal Preference |
| Shader Quality | Low |
| Tessellation | Off |
| Terrain Memory | Max |
| On-Demand Texture Streaming | Off |
| Streaming Quality | Low |
| Volumetric Quality | Low |
| Deferred Physics Quality | Off |
| Water Caustics | Off |
| Shadow Map Resolution | Medium |
| Screen Space Resolution | Off |
| Spot Shadow Quality | Low |
| Cache Spot Shadows | On |
| Spot Cache | Low |
| Cache Sun Shadows | On |
| Particle Lighting | Low |
| Ambient Occlusion | Off |
| Screen Space Reflection | Off |
| Weather Grid Volumes | Off |
| NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency | On / On + Boost |
| Depth of Field | Off |
| Motion Blur | Off |
| Film Grain | 0.00 |
After you’re done, simply apply the settings and start a match to benchmark how these settings are fairing compared to previous ones.
Here’s a quick look at different presets of cost-intensive settings in Warzone 2.0:
Ambient Occlusion
Best GPU Settings For Warzone 2
We’ve finally configured all the best Warzone 2 settings in-game. Now it’s time to optimize your GPU control panel settings. Simply follow the two sections below and you’ll be set.
Nvidia
| Image Sharpening | Personal Preference |
| Anisotropic Filtering | Off |
| FXAA – Antialiasing | Off |
| Gamma Correction – Antialiasing | Off |
| Mode 0 Antialiasing | Off |
| Background Max Frame Rate | 20 |
| CUDA – GPUS | All |
| Low Latency Mode | Ultra |
| Max Frame Rate | Personal Preference / Off |
| Open GL Rendering GPU | Select GPU Here |
| Power Management Mode | Prefer Max Performance |
| Shader Cache | Driver Default |
| Monitor Technology | GSync |
| Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA) | Off |
| Anisotropic Sample Optimization – Texture Filtering | On |
| Negative LOD Bias – Texture Filtering | Allow |
| Quality – Texture Filtering | High Performance |
| Trilinear Optimization – Texture Filtering | On |
| Threaded Optimization | Auto |
| Triple Buffering | Off |
| Vertical Sync | Off |
After applying all the settings mentioned above, click on the apply button. Once, all the settings are applied, launch the game and experience the best performance Warzone 2 has to offer on your PC. You can also check out our Best Nvidia Settings guide to get an in-depth outlook on these settings.
AMD
| Radeon Anti-Lag | Enabled |
| AMD Radeon Chill | Disabled |
| Radeon Boost | Disabled |
| Image Sharpening | Personal Preference |
| Radeon Enhanced Sync | Enable |
| Wait for Vertical Refresh | Always Off |
| Frame Rate Target Control | Disabled |
| Antialiasing | Use Application Settings |
| Antialiasing Method | Multisampling |
| Morphological Anti-Aliasing | Disabled |
| Anisotropic Filtering | Disabled |
| Texture Filtering Quality | Performance |
| Surface Format Optimization | Override Application Settings |
| Maximum Tessellation Level | Off |
| OpenGL Triple Buffering | Disabled |
| Reset Triple Buffering | Reset |
And there you have it. Simply exit from AMD Radeon settings after applying the settings above and you’ll be good to go. Launch Warzone 2 to try out the best AMD Radeon settings we’ve helped you configure just now.
Bonus Windows Optimization Tips
Last but not least, we’ll need to configure your Windows 10/11 to help Warzone 2 perform at its best. These will also help you resolve some of the critical issues like Warzone 2 FPS drops, crashing, and black screens. Let’s go through each of them right now.
Turn On Game Mode
Game Mode is one of the most notorious features Microsoft added back in Windows 10. It helps prioritize your games by putting background tasks on standby or limiting their access to your system resources.
Here’s how you can enable it:
- Enter Windows Settings with WIN + I.
- Click on the Gaming Tab on the left > access to Windows Gaming utilities.
- Go to the Game Mode settings > Turn the Game Mode on.
After you’re done enabling it, simply close out of Windows Settings and launch Warzone 2. Windows Game Mode will activate on its own and improve your game’s performance and stability.
Edit Warzone 2 Config File
There are several settings that you can change in the Call of Duty Warzone 2 config file which cannot be accessed through the regular graphics menu. Editing these options in the config file according to this section can help you improve performance and stability in Warzone 2. Here’s how to do it:
- Locate and open the config file for Warzone 2 > It’s location is as follows:
This PC > Documents > Call of Duty > Players >
- Once you reach the config file location > Open the file called, “Options.3.cod22.cst.”
- Use the find function in Notepad (CTRL+F) > Type AsyncCompute and hit find.
- Set the AsyncCompute setting to “False.“
- Now search for “ClutterMaxDist” in the find function.
- You’ll find a range of numbers next to the current value for the cluttermaxdist setting > Copy the minimum value of the range (i.e. 100.000000) > Replace it with the current value in quotes. (e.g. 2500.000000 will be replaced with 100.000000).
- Now, search for “Thread Count for Handling the Job” in the find function > You’ll have to set the value to the number of cores your processors have. For Example, in my case, I have an 8-core process, so I’ve set the value here to 8.
- After you’re done configuring these settings > Hit the save shortcut CTRL+S to save changes.
After you’re done with the configuration file, launch Warzone 2 to experience the performance improvement these tweaks have on your gameplay.
Turn OFF Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling
Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling was released alongside Windows 10 and has remained a pretty great performance-enhancing feature to this day. In several game setting guides, I’ve always told you to turn this feature on to improve the game’s performance and stability.
Here’s how you can do this if you’ve previously turned it On:
- Type GPU settings in the Windows Search Bar > Click on the first result that shows up.
- Once you’re in the graphics settings menu > Click on the “Change Default Graphics Settings” option right under Default Settings.
- Here, you can simply turn off Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling.
And that’s how you’ll get the best performance in Call of Duty Warzone 2 without needing to get some expensive upgrades. There are tons of tweaks and optimizations where these came from, so check out our Windows 10 best settings/optimizations guide to find newer ways to boost the performance of your PC.
Ending Words
Call of Duty Warzone 2.0 has been quite heavy on system resources from the get-go. Now Warzone 2.0’s performance as a whole is quite notorious as I’ve seen players complain about FPS drops on Blizzard forums. An interest report I’ve seen indicated that performance on the Steam version is inferior to the Battle.Net version which was mind-boggling.
If I combine my personal experience tinkering with the settings for performance and the reports I’ve seen, I have nothing but one conclusion. Warzone 2 has come a long way from being a glitchy mess to significantly much smoother. However, it still has some distance to go before it’s optimization can come close to being great.
Thankfully, the developers have been rolling performance patches which may improve the game even more post-writing this guide. Fingers crossed!
Update is rolling out to fix PC performance issues caused by the Season 4 Reloaded update https://t.co/xH8sTDfzx4
— ModernWarzone (@ModernWarzone) July 15, 2023
Questions & Answers
Use a combination of medium to low in-game settings as instructed in the best Warzone 2 settings guide above and tune your GPU settings to eliminate lag.
If you have a decently specced PC and want Warzone 2 to look prettier, you can use higher setting presets in the in-game graphics options. You can additionally use sharpening sliders in the GPU settings for additional clarity.
Warzone 2 requires a relatively modern PC to run smoothly. However, the game is optimized enough to give you a somewhat playable experience on older hardware as well.
You can check out Asad’s review of Warzone 2 if you want to know more about the game.
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