Is Call Of Duty Warzone CPU Or GPU Intensive?

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Warzone is Call of Duty’s take on the popular battle royale genre and it features a massive map that takes a toll on almost any PC. If you are interested in playing Warzone or building a PC for the game you need to know the answer to the question “Is Call of Duty Warzone CPU Or GPU Intensive?”.

In this article, we will be answering that question as well as showing you how to fix some common performance problems. At the end of the article, we will give you our CPU and GPU recommendations for Call of Duty Warzone.

Is Warzone CPU Or GPU Intensive?

Is Warzone CPU Or GPU Intensive

Call of Duty Warzone is considered a GPU intensive game, but it also requires a powerful CPU if you want to avoid bottlenecking. Like most games these days, Warzone needs more GPU power than CPU. If you want to run the game on high settings with consistently high FPS you will need a good GPU.

Having just a powerful GPU will not be enough though, you will also need a good CPU that can keep up with the GPU and prevent bottlenecking. If you are looking to upgrade or build a new PC for Warzone the majority of your budget should go into the GPU, but you should leave enough money to get a decent CPU and fast RAM.

Overall, Warzone is poorly optimized for the PC and even good PCs can run into some performance problems in-game. Warzone features a massive map with a ton of weapons, buildings, vehicles, and players to render and load. So, Warzone requires an above-average PC to play at a smooth 60+ FPS with little to no lag.

What Causes High CPU Usage in Warzone?

High CPU usage in Warzone can be caused by a lot of different things due to the game being poorly optimized. A lot of people run into extremely high CPU usage and wonder what the problem is. Here are the top reasons you might be experiencing high CPU usage in Warzone.

Outdated CPU

One of the biggest reasons people have high CPU usage in Warzone is an outdated or old CPU. Oftentimes, people forget about the CPU and upgrade the GPU multiple times before getting a more powerful processor. This leads to a bottleneck in the computer performance and the only way to fix it is to get a better CPU.

Old Drivers

Drivers are constantly being updated for different games and if you neglect to update your drivers long enough you can run into problems. Make sure to check that you have the latest drivers available for your PC components.

Insufficient RAM

Another reason for high CPU usage in Warzone is not having enough RAM. The recommended amount of RAM for Warzone is 8GB.

However, if you only have 8GB of RAM you will not be able to have anything open in the background without the performance suffering. A lot of times people have programs open in the background or something up on their second monitor using up their RAM. Next time you boot up Warzone try closing everything in the background and see how the game performs.

How To Fix High CPU Usage In Warzone

High CPU usage in Warzone is not necessarily a problem as long as you are not running into performance problems like lagging, freezing, or crashing. Warzone is a very demanding game so high CPU usage is not uncommon. Here are the best things to do if you are experiencing problems:

Update Drivers

One of the first things you should do when experiencing problems in any game is check and see if there are any driver updates for your graphics card. Having the latest drivers is a great way to get a performance boost. For NVIDIA graphics cards open Geoforce Experience or head to the NVIDIA website. For AMD users, open Radeon Settings or download the latest drivers from the AMD website

Lower Graphic Settings

If you are experiencing low fps, stuttering, or lagging one of the first things you should do is lower your graphics settings to the lowest possible. Then see if the performance increases. If it doesn’t then you may not have the necessary components to run the game or you need to try some of our other suggestions.

Disable NVIDIA Overlay

If you have an NVIDIA GPU, try turning off the NVIDIA overlay which is known to cause crashing problems in Warzone and many other games. To turn off the NVIDIA overlay follow these steps:

  • Open GeForce Experience.
  • Click Settings and then the ‘General’ tab.
  • Turn off the In-Game Overlay toggle.
  • Restart Warzone and check the performance.

Increase Virtual Memory

In order to play Warzone, you are going to need a minimum of 8GB of RAM. If your PC is struggling to perform while playing due to not enough RAM you can try increasing your virtual memory. Increasing your virtual memory is done by temporarily converting parts of your hard drive.

Follow these steps to increase your virtual memory:

  • Press the Windows key and type ‘Control Panel’ into the search bar.
  • Open the application and go to ‘System’.
  • Head to Advanced system settings.
  • Under the Advanced tab, click ‘Settings’ in the Performance section.
  • Go to the Advanced tab once again.
  • Click ‘Change’ in the Virtual Memory section.
  • Uncheck Automatically manage paging files size for all drives.
  • Select the drive where Warzone is installed and choose Custom size.
  • Put a value more than 2GB (2048MB) for both the Initial and Maximum size.
  • Click ‘Set’ and ‘OK’.
  • Finally, click the ‘OK’ button again.
  • Reboot your PC and check if your performance in game improves.

Can You Play Warzone Without A Graphics Card?

No, you can not play Warzone without a graphics card. Without a GPU you will not be able to load the main menu. A GPU or at the very least an APU from AMD is required to play Call of Duty Warzone.

While you really shouldn’t consider playing Warzone without a graphics card you can get away with using a CPU with integrated graphics like the AMD Ryzen 5700G if you are on a budget. However, you will need to be on a 1080p resolution and low to medium settings to get 60+ FPS with an APU.

To play Warzone you will need a good CPU even if the game is more dependent on the GPU. Here are the CPUs for Call of Duty Warzone we recommend to get 60+ FPS on high settings for all resolutions:

If you want to play Warzone with CPUs listed above on 144 FPS you can either turn down the graphics settings a bit or scale down the resolution.

The GPU is the most important part of almost any PC build and this is especially so for a game like Warzone. Here are the GPUs for Call of Duty Warzone we recommend to get 60+ FPS on high settings for all resolutions:

Once again, if you want to play Warzone at 144 FPS or higher with GPUs recommended above you can scale the resolution or the graphics settings.

Conclusion

As you can see, Call of Duty Warzone is a very demanding game for any computer, and even if it’s considered more GPU intensive than CPU that doesn’t mean you can get by with an outdated processor. Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of how to fix high CPU usage as well as what the best PC components for Warzone are.

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