Call of Duty Warzone: PC Settings Guide
11th June 2021

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Author: Andrey Goloshubov a.k.a. Dallon Avery feat. 7Box

In this guide we’re going to talk about the graphics settings in Warzone for PC’s, what each of those settings does and how you should approach tuning them. One of our PROs will also share his settings in this blog, so read on!

The Engine That Provide Photorealistic Image

When we saw the first trailer for Modern Warfare 2019, it became apparent that technologically and visually, that installment would become a big milestone in the franchise. Real-life accuracy, state of the art physically-based rendering techniques and photogrammetry – a science of scanning objects directly into the developer’s authoring tools replicating not just the shape, but material properties such as the roughness, reflectivity of the scanned object. Whether we’re talking about the environmental detail composed of high-level detail of each individual stone in a pile of rubble or the uncanny replicas of the game’s weapons and their customized ceramic finishes – the game’s IW 8.0, the heavily modified CoD engine accommodates all of this with superb performance. That said, as we all know, Warzone runs on this particular engine, unlike Black Ops Cold War which runs on a different one. So, what this means is that as a free-to-play Battle Royale game, Warzone is able to provide a full spectrum of the technological advancement of MW2019 to those players whose machines are capable of running it. But, not everyone has top of the line PCs. Because of that, the developers have included an extensive and very detailed list of customizable settings, so that everyone can experience the game in high FPS by tuning them.

Surely, the key binding settings are somewhat individual. Although some other parameters can drastically affect both the technical performance of the game and your own match results to the point where you might win or lose a game depending on how well you tuned your settings.Properly set mouse sensitivity values for your mouse, for the ADS, as well as Mouse Acceleration, Filtering and Smoothing. So, let’s go over all of them and talk about what they do and how to tune them.

Graphics Settings

All of the settings in this category are divided into sub-categories for easier navigation. Let’s look at 7Box’s preferences and then we’ll go over each setting and explain what they do.

As we can see on the screenshot above, 7Box has disabled V-sync to nullify the input lag. He isn’t recording any highlights, but he is using the full potential of NVidia's Reflex Low Latency feature.

Display – the good thing about this category is that you don’t really have to mess with it much, just leave all of it on default.

Display Mode – Windowed, Fullscreen, Fullscreen Borderless, Fullscreen Extended Window. For better performance, better leave this one on Fullscreen.
Display Monitor – choose a monitor if you have more than one.
Display Adapter – choose a graphics card if you have more than one.
Screen Refresh Rate – set it to your monitor’s refresh rate
Render Resolution – if you’re experiencing low FPS, you could try out lowering this parameter. Say, you have a 4K monitor, but the native Render Resolution doesn’t give you a good FPS. In this case you could lover Render Resolution to FullHD without actually changing the screen resolution itself!
Aspect Ratio – should be default and set to your monitor’s aspect ratio
Sync Every Frame (V-Sync) – smoothing frame change limits your overall framerate, preventing screen tearing effect but introduces a small input lag.
Custom Frame Limit – you could experiment with this option, but the best thing to do is to leave it on the default value.
NVidia Highlights – records your kills and deaths through the NVidia Experience integration. This feature, obviously, requires you to have specific NVidia hardware (graphics card)
NVidia Reflex Low Latency – another NVidia exclusive technology that is used to reduce system latency which increases PC responsiveness. Try it out and see if it helps in your instance.
Restart Shaders Installation – this option is used to delete and download the shaders cache. It prevents performance issues when playing on a map for the very first time.
Display Gamma – changes the game’s gamma. Best leave this setting at its default value, unless you have problems seeing things (if something appears to be too dark or too bright).

Here we can see that 7Box isn’t taking the risks with performance by setting most of the options to normal and disabling the Tessellation. Particle Quality is set to low, because it’s not like you’re going to appreciate the quality of each separate particle created by an explosion anyway.

Details & Textures - this is one of your most important categories of settings. Experiment here to find the best performance/quality balance.

Streaming Quality – The game loads up object textures depending on your distance to aforementioned objects. The Low setting focuses on performance over quality, Normal is the opposite. Choose low if your VRAM is less than 4GB.
Texture Resolution – higher resolution means more detailed surfaces.
Texture Filter Anisotropic – responsible for the quality of surfaces when viewed at an angle. Doesn’t seem to use much VRAM.
Particle Quality – quality of explosions, gunshots and so forth and the particles that these effects create.
Bullet impacts & Sprays – enables or disables bullet holes on surfaces and custom sprays
Tessellation – determines the amount of scene geometry that is being subdivided for better looking rendering results.
On-demand Texture Streaming – an interesting option that is responsible for downloading high quality textures to your hard disk when you’re in the game. A totally experimental option, which you could leave alone if you don’t really understand what it's for.
Daily Download limit (GB) – only enabled if the On-demand Texture Streaming is on.
Texture Cache Size (GB) - only enabled if the On-demand Texture Streaming is on.

Here 7Box is also keeping his settings relatively low. Note how he is taking advantage of the shadows caching options!

Shadow & Lighting - another performance-heavy category of settings.

Shadow Map Resolution – a rather VRAM heavy option that determines the sharpness and overall quality of shadows.
Cache Spot Shadows – if enabled, speeds up the rendering for future frames at the cost of additional RAM memory.
Cache Sun Shadows – same as the previous setting.
Particle Lighting – determines the quality of lighting of particle effects.
DirectX Raytracing – only available to the happy owners of NVidia RTX family of graphics cards. Enables real-time ray-tracing rendering technique that creates more realistic shadows, created by the local light sources in the scene and displays their rays.
Ambient Occlusion – is a soft shadow technology that adds depth to the surfaces – uses some amount of VRAM
Screen Space Reflections (SSR) – simply determines the quality of reflections that are created by reflective surfaces such as water, glass, mirrors etc.

Every possible visual filter and post-processing effect is turned off. The SMAA 1X is a good Anti-Aliasing option for middle-tier PCs, so you’ll get the best balance between the quality of the image and performance.

Post Processing Effects – allow you to apply additional visual filters to create more cinematic experience. Most of the settings here don’t require much of your machine’s working juices.

Filmic Strength – adjusts the amount of temporal blurring and image stability when anti-aliasing the scene.
Anti-Aliasing – one of the most common settings in all games. A post-process effect that smoothest edges in the final rendered image preventing the “ladder” or jagged effect. Turn off for better performance.
Depth of Field – creates blur that simulates the focus vision on the screen. Doesn’t use any computing power.
World Motion Blur – enables or disables blurring effect while moving around
Weapon Motion Blur – enables or disables blurring effect to your weapons when using them.
Film Grain – a simple filter that adds visual noise to the frame for cinematic experience. Purely cosmetic setting just like the rest in this category.
Dynamic Resolution – it’s a lot like the Render Resolution Setting, only this one will decrease or increase the render resolution based on what frame rate you wish to achieve.
Dynamic Resolution Framerate Target – simply sets your target FPS for the Dynamic Resolution option.

Audio Settings

When tuning audio settings, you should always keep in mind your hardware. Whether you’re using an advanced 5.1 Surround sound system, gaming headset, or simple ear buds, always be mindful of your hardware’s limitations and technical capabilities. The same goes for your microfone.

As you can see here, these 7Box’s settings simply represent his personal preferences when it comes to the sound volumes in the game.

Same as before we have categories and sub-categories.

Volumes – in this section you can customize the volumes of various sounds.

Audio Mix – is your sound device preset. Select the one that suits you.
Master Volume – is the overall game’s sound volume
Music Volume – the volume of in-game music.
Dialogue Volume - the volume of the character’s voices like quips, callouts and one-liners.
Effects Volume – the in-game effects include everything from sounds of weapon firing to explosions. You want to adjust this setting so you can hear everything.
Juggernaut Music – this is just the effect for the Juggernaut killstreak.
Hit Marker Sound Effects – you can set the hit marker sound to Classic version or modern MW version.
Mono Audio – when disabled, the audio output is split into left and right channels that provides the sense of direction of the sound source. When enabled, there’s only one channel for sound, which means, it’s best to leave this option disabled.

His Voice Chat settings deserve a closer look. The activation mode is set to Push to Talk which is very convenient. Notice that his chosen activation button is his Mouse 5. You might not have the same button on your mouse, or maybe you’ll feel more comfortable with binding this to a key on your keyboard. No Voice Chat Effects are enabled, which means 7Box’s teammates will be able to hear him lou & clear.

Voice Chat – this set of settings is for tuning your in-game communications using the microphone.

Voice Chat – you can totally disable the entire feature if you want
Voice Chat Device – is for selecting the proper sound recording device, i.e. your microphone.
Microphone Activation Mode – can be set either to “Push to Talk” or “Open Mic”.
Voice Chat (Push to Talk) – here you can set up the button that activates the voice chat for you if the previous setting is set to “Push to Talk”.
Open Mic Recording Threshold – if you’ve selected the “Open Mic” option, here you can tune the volume threshold that triggers microphone recording. This is so needed so that your microphone doesn’t “catch” any unwanted sounds you might have in the background.
Voice Chat Volume – just regulates the volume of the incoming voice chat.
Microphone Volume – regulates the volume of your own voice.
Voice Chat Effect – additional effect that can stylize the voice chat resembles the old school MW chatter or the SAS radio effects for stealth missions.

War Tracks – custom tunes that could be played whenever you’re driving a vehicle.

War Tracks as a Passenger – turns on or off your ability to hear the driver's War Track when you’re a passenger.
War Tracks Volume – simply regulates the volume of played War Tracks.

Mouse Settings

Your Mouse settings and especially your sensitivity must not only correspond to your personal preference but also should reference and be based on your Mouse’s parameters. For instance, 7Box is using Logitech Pro X Superlight with 400dpi, therefore his settings are this:

Mouse Sensitivity – defines how much mouse movement affects aim during gameplay. Applies to horizontal and vertical sensitivity. You can tune the same setting for the game menus separately
Aim Down Sight (ADS) Mouse Sensitivity – defines which algorithm is used for the mouse mouse sensitivity when ADSing. In the Legacy option your rotation speed is reduced based on your new field of view. This is how it used to be in previous titles. The Relative option means that your rotation speed is adjusted to travel a specific monitor distance with the same mouse movement, no matter your zoom level.
Invert Mouse Look – here you can invert the vertical axis and select when it would be applied – always or only for airborne vehicles.
Mouse Acceleration – an option to artificially accelerate aim speed when making quick mouse movements. With this you sacrifice precision for quicker turnarounds.
Mouse Filtering – determines how much the mouse input of the previous frames is taken into consideration on the current frame. Fiddling with this setting you will essentially sacrifice precision for normalized movement.
Mouse Smoothing – when enabled this smoothes the aim movement based on the two last frames’ average. Also sacrifices precision for normalized movements.

Tune Well to Win the Game

Hopefully, by now you understand a little bit more of what each setting in the game is responsible for and know how to customize them to maximize your gaming experience and game performance. If you have any questions about the settings for your PC or you wish to learn the game as deeply as our pros, then order a session with our pros at legionfarm.com/wz. Our professional and competitive gamers will help you tune the settings to best suit your rig and give you lots of useful tips about the gameplay. We have such stars as: 7Box, Legendary117, Gully, x whisper o, Leijone and others. So, what are you waiting for? Hurry up and team up with them and become a better player in Warzone!