Call of Duty: Warzone PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Call of Duty: Warzone PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Introduction

With Black Ops 4, Call of Duty entered the world of Battle Royale, and with Modern Warfare, Infinity Wars reworked the Call of Duty Engine to deliver heightened hardware efficiency, stable performance and the addition of new graphical features. 

Now, Infinity Ward has taken a bold step forward with the Call of Duty series, creating a Battle Royale game mode which supports more players, crisper visuals than Black Ops 4. Better yet, the game is available for free on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. This is Call of Duty: Warzone, the next-generation of Call of Duty’s Battle Royale experiences. 

Technically speaking, Warzone is a free-to-play mode for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a factor which forces gamers to download most of Modern Warfare’s content to access. This has given gamers incredibly large install sizes for Modern Warfare’s Warzone game mode, but the counter to that is the game’s variety of weapons types and customisation options, as it takes content from Modern Warfare’s existing multiplayer modes. 

On PC, we will note that Call of Duty: Warzone lacks support for DRX raytracing, an option which is exclusive to Modern Warfare’s campaign and some of the game’s multiplayer modes. Only rasterised shadows are offered here, but when over 100 players are trying to kill you, you shouldn’t be spending your time looking at the quality of Warzone’s shadows. 
  
In this analysis, we will be looking at Call of Duty: Warzone’s performance on PC, testing ten graphics cards, four CPU configurations and at most of the game’s graphical settings. We will let you know how well your PC should run Warzone, and what settings you should lower to get higher framerates out of your system. 

 
Contents


– PC System Requirements, RTX and Graphics Options
– CPU Performance – Do you need a monster CPU to play this game?
– RX 5700 VS RTX 2060 – Performance Scaling – Low, Medium, High and Max
– Optimisation Tips – Which settings will have the most impact?

– 1080p Performance
– 1440p Performance
– 4K Performance
– Conclusion

GPU drivers

When testing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s PC version, we opted to use the newest drivers from both the Radeon and Geforce camps. These drivers are AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 20.2.2 driver as well as Nvidia’s Geforce 442.59 driver.

Testing Methodology

OC3D is a website that is dedicated to PC hardware, so you better believe that we test every game on a wide range of hardware configurations. This commitment to variety means that we will be using both Intel and AMD based testbeds as well as a range of GPU offerings from both Nvidia and Radeon. 

Our primary test system uses Intel’s X99 platform, containing an Intel Core i7 6850K at a fixed clock speed of 4GHz. This testbed will use 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory and will be powered and cooled by an HX1200i PSU and an H110i AIO liquid cooler respectively, with everything sitting inside a Corsair 460X chassis. In this system, we are using an ASUS Strix X99 motherboard.

The system below will be used to conduct the majority of our game testing. This system will be used in this review unless otherwise stated.

 


Game Test Rig

Intel i7 6850K @4.0 GHz
ASUS X99 Strix
Corsair Vengeance LP 4x8GB DDR4 3200MHz
Corsair HX1200i
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10 x64 “May 2019” Update

 

GPU Selection

No gaming test suite would be complete without a large selection of GPUs. At OC3D out current test suite covers Nvidia’s RTX 20-series and GTX 10-series alongside AMD’s RX Vega and RX 500 series graphics cards.

Starting with Metro Exodus, we began testing new PC games with Nvidia’s latest RTX series of graphics cards. In our testing, we currently use the mid-range RTX 2060 and uber high-end RTX 2080 Ti entering our graphics card lineup. In time we hope to have a Radeon RX 5700 graphics card for RTX 2060 VS RX 5700 comparisons. 

With this performance analysis, OC3D’s main review staff has been able to work together from across the UK to deliver wider levels of performance testing than is common for our gaming content. This has enabled us to add a wider range of GPUs to our test suite for this review. 


Radeon RX 5700 Series – Navi (RDNA)

– Powercolor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil 
– Powercolor Radeon RX 5700 Red Devil

PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT LE Cooler

Geforce RTX 20-Series & GTX 16-Series


– Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
– Nvidia RTX 2060 Founders Edition
– Palit GTX 1660 Super StormX

nVidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti ReviewnVidia RTX 2060 Review


Geforce GTX 10-series

– Nvidia GTX 1080 Founders Edition
– Nvidia GTX 1070 Founders Edition
– ASUS GTX 1060 Strix Gaming OC

 

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AMD RX Vega Series

– AMD RX Vega 56

AMD RX 500 Series

– AMD RX 580 Strix OC