Call of Duty: Warzone Best Settings and Options Guide

Diehard CoD fans might not have been surprised, but for the majority of the gaming world the release of the free to play Warzone mode came as a complete surprise back in 2020. Much like a Precision Airstrike, Infinity Ward dropped their take on the Battle Royale genre without much advance warning.

Warzone is by far the most popular BR version of the CoD formula, and it is still going strong to this day. With the game being free to play, we’re seeing a lot of new players entering the game every single day, and for this reason we’ve let our analysts loose on the game. They came up with the best settings for you to use in the game so that you can rack up those kills without being limited by your PC’s performance.

Best Mouse Settings for Call of Duty: Warzone

Mouse settings are something very personal; some people love to use a very low sensitivity while others like a higher one, for example. Regardless of that, there are definitely a couple of pointers to follow. In general it’s best to make sure that nothing is impacting your ‘raw aim,’ so turning off things such as acceleration and smoothing is a good idea. You also don’t want your general sensitivity to be outrageously high, as you will lack precision and micro control.

Fun Facts

Best Controller Settings for Call of Duty: Warzone

Not many people play PC shooters with a controller because usually controllers are at a gigantic disadvantage when compared to the speed and precision that you get with a mouse, but in some games (like Warzone) it’s a different story. In fact, some aspects of the game can be considered easier with a controller thanks to the built in aim assist. On the whole the game seems pretty well balanced, so we wouldn’t say that one is better than the other, but if you’re a controller player and you’re looking for controller settings to start out with you can always check out Nickmercs’ settings for a good starting point.

Best Sensitivity and ADS Sensitivity for Call of Duty: Warzone

We just said that sensitivity is something personal, and that’s very true, but you’d be surprised at just how low the overall sensitivity (commonly measured in eDPI) of pro shooter gamers is when compared to most casual gamers.

Let’s take a look at Shroud‘s Warzone settings, for example. He’s rocking a DPI of 450 and a sensitivity of 7.50 at the time of writing this article. If we multiply his sensitivity with his DPI we can easily calculate his eDPI.

While we don’t advocate blindly copying any pro player’s setup or settings (it’s important to use settings and gear that make you feel comfortable) it is a good idea to see how the pros approach this topic if you’re brand new to this whole thing.

If you’re way above the average professional DPI and you’re having trouble aiming you might want to consider lowering your sensitivity. If your sensitivity is too high, you just cannot make the necessary micro adjustments to hit anything further than close range shots, so it’s important to find a sensitivity that allows you to comfortably flick and also gives you the necessary consistency when aiming.

Another setting that’s down to personal preference is your ADS sensitivity. The players that we analyze are split on this subject but if you’re completely new to PC gaming we would recommend relative.

Other settings are, as expected, pretty cut and dry. Acceleration, filtering, and smoothing are big ‘no-no’s’ for mouse sensors so it doesn’t make sense to let the game you’re playing add these things. Whether or not you play inverted is technically personal preference, but pretty much no pro player that we analyze plays inverted so unless you already have thousands of hours of muscle memory we recommend just going for the regular way of aiming.

• Mouse Sensitivity: Set this to your preferred sensitivity. An outrageously high sensitivity isn’t necessary and can even be detrimental in long range gunfights, so we suggest going with something that works for all ranges.
• Aim Down Sight (ADS) Mouse Sensitivity: If you’re new to the game we recommend setting this to relative for consistency’s sake, which means that your zoomed in sensitivity will be matched with your hipfire sensitivity. This makes changing between weapons and zoom levels less jarring, but if you’re a seasoned CoD veteran you can always go for legacy (which is how this was handled in previous CoD games).
• Invert Mouse Look: We recommend setting this to disabled, unless you really are used to having your aim inverted.
• Mouse Acceleration: Mouse acceleration is something that can completely ruin the consistency of your aim, so we recommend to set this to 0.00. If you want to read more on this topic you can click here.
• Mouse Filtering: Set this to 0.00; that gives you the most precision. In general you want your mouse aim to be as ‘raw’ as possible, so it’s a good idea to leave any filtering out of the equation.
• Mouse Smoothing: Mouse smoothing is another form of prediction that can interfere with your aim so you should absolutely disable this. For consistency you want your ingame crosshair to match your mouse movement pretty much 1:1. For more info on mouse smoothing you can click here.

Best Call of Duty: Warzone Audio Settings

Audio settings can be a bit personal, but we do recommend going for the ‘Boost High’ audio mix since it’ll boost things like footsteps in favor of lowering the emphasis on explosions or other, more bassy sounds that you don’t really need to perform if you’re a competitive player.

For the same reason we’ve turned off music, but if you like the atmosphere that the music in the game creates it’s definitely possible to leave it on or to set it to a lower volume. As far as Voice Chat options go it’s pretty much personal: every headset/mic is different so this just comes down to experimenting with what’s ideal for your specific setup.

Best Call of Duty: Warzone Video Settings and Refresh Rate

Call of Duty can be a gorgeous game to look at but if you want to be competitive you’ll want to turn your settings down. Performance always trumps eye candy for competitive gamers, so it’s a good idea to maximize your framerate at all times. Even if you’re gaming on a standard 60 Hz monitor there are numerous advantages to having a high framerate, by the way.

Almost every pro that we analyze is using a 240Hz monitor and rig to go with it, and that not only gives you an advantage when it comes to the visual aspect (everything will look a whole lot smoother and easier to track) but it also reduces the input latency from between 55 to 75 milliseconds to a mere 20 to 35 milliseconds. For the full breakdown on why all pros are trying to get the highest framerates possible you can read our full guide, but rest assured that you’ll want to be maximizing your frames per second if you’re going to be competitive in any shooter game, or else you’re leaving yourself at a disadvantage.

Getting high framerates usually isn’t an issue for people with the most powerful rigs and the newest graphics cards but luckily developers Infinity Ward have released a reasonably well-optimized game with CoD: Warzone. There’s a myriad of graphics options to tweak to get every last drop of performance out of your machine, no matter what the internals are. We’ve gone over all of these options and have come up with a good compromise between visual clarity and performance so that you can use these settings yourself or use our guide as a baseline for your own setup.

To start off we recommend you to run the game at your monitor’s native resolution. As far as the Field Of View (FOV) goes we’ve noticed that setting this around 100 (give or take a bit) gives us and the streamers that we’ve been watching the best compromise between performance and having a good overview of the battlefield.

Quick tip: make sure that you’ve got the newest drivers for your GPU installed before playing the game.

Using DLSS in Call of Duty: Warzone

Warzone has DLSS support for RTX cards. This is an AI technology that uses an artificial intelligence network to help render the images that gets displayed on your screen so that your GPU doesn’t have to do all of the work ‘on the spot’. If you’re interested in a more in-depth explanation on this technology you can always read our article, but what’s more important to know is that the tech really does work.

You can expect a very decent performance boost (at least 10%) so if you’ve got an RTX graphics card we would definitely recommend you to experiment with this setting a bit. What mode you should set it to depends on what your preferences are though we recommend either Performance or Balanced.

NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency Technology

As is the case with our other analyzed games, reducing your overall system latency is the name of the game in CoD: Warzone. It’s one of the reasons that the vast majority of pros prefer frame rates over visual fidelity (higher frame rates = lower system latency) and recently, NVIDIA released their Reflex Low Latency Platform to help gamers with that. We’ll briefly go over the two major advantages of the platform here but if you’re interested you can always read our more in-depth article, or read NVIDIA’s own detailed explanation.

The first major pillar of the Reflex platform is the Low Latency Mode. In compatible games (Warzone is one) the overall system latency gets reduced by having the GPU and CPU work in sync in a more efficient manner, thus reducing the render queue. Depending on your setup there are a lot of gains to be made here, so this is quite interesting if you want to reduce your system latency as much as possible.

The second advantage lies in the fact that you can analyze your system’s latency with the Latency Analyzer (as long as you’ve got compatible gear). This is handy because it allows you to determine whether or not a certain peripheral is causing a drop in response times, for example.

Whether or not this technology will be a game changer for you will depend of course, but since NVIDIA GPUs are used by the vast majority of pros we though it would be interesting to add a small section to this guide.

Best Call of Duty: Warzone Video Settings

• Display Mode: Go with fullscreen here for the best performance.
• Refresh Rate: Leave this at your monitor’s native refresh rate.
• Render Resolution: It’s best to leave this at 100. You can save frames by lowering this but it quickly makes the game look messy so it’s best to save frames elsewhere.
• Aspect Ratio: Set this at automatic.
• Sync Every Frame (V-Sync): Disable this. Turning on V-Sync can cause input lag which is something that you want to avoid.
• Custom Framerate Limit: We recommend going for unlimited here, though you can also lower it if you feel like the game is too choppy at unlimited.
• NVIDIA Highlights: We like to leave this off since it does nothing for your actual gaming performance. If you want to record your gameplay you of course can, but be aware of the fact that this might come with a (slight) performance drop, depending on how you’re recording.
• NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: Set this to enabled + boost. It’ll make  the game feel a lot snappier and reduce your latency, which is always a big bonus.
• Display Gamma: Leave this at 2.2 (sRGB) unless you’re playing on a television.
• Streaming Quality: Leave this at low. It makes texture in the distance look a bit better, but you’re not at a disadvantage if you leave it on low and you gain a decent amount of frames by setting it to low.
• Texture Resolution: We recommend going for low or normal, depending on the power of your system. This setting only makes the game look prettier and it’s pretty taxing on performance.
• Texture Filtering Anisotropic: The difference between all the different settings isn’t that noticeable ingame so we recommend normal.
• Particle Quality: You can set this to low to save a couple of frames, but it has a rather small impact on performance so leaving it on high is also an option if you’ve got a decently powerful machine.
• Bullet Impacts & Sprays: The impact on your framerate is pretty small by leaving this enabled and it can help you determine where players have already been or where they’re shooting from so we suggest enabling it.
• Tessellation: Disabling this has very little impact on how the game looks, but it also has an extremely small impact on your frames, so we set this to all.
• On-Demand Texture Streaming: This is a feature that was implemented to reduce the overall file size of Warzone. With this enabled it’ll stream the textures that the game requires rather than grabbing them from local storage. This setting only affects weapon and operator textures on higher settings, and is thus useless for competitive settings. We recommend disabling this setting, as it doesn’t give you any advantages in the game itself.
• Shadow Map Resolution: The highest settings give you some pretty looking shadows but it takes a large toll on your frames and those shadows don’t help you ingame at all, so we recommend normal or low here.
• Cache Spot Shadows: We suggest enabling this, unless you have less than 16 GB of RAM.
• Cache Sun Shadows: We recommend enabling this unless you have less than 16 GB of RAM.
• Particle Lighting: This is another ‘eye candy’ feature so we recommend going for low to save a couple of frames.
• DirectX Raytracing: Raytracing makes the game look very pretty but it’s an absolute performance hog so you should disable this.
• Ambient Occlusion: Adds a certain ‘depth’ to shadows and lighting in general. Disable this to get a sizable framerate bonus at virtually no graphical fidelity cost.
• Screen Space Reflection (SSR): Disabling this nets you a couple of frames per second while enabling this doesn’t give you any useful advantage so we recommend disabling this.
• Anti-Aliasing: This gives corners and edges a smoother look, but it eats at performance. If you need extra frames you can set this to off, but that does make the game look very pixelated. If that bothers you it’s a good idea to use SMAA 1X for a nice compromise.
• Filmic Strength: Leave this at 1.00 since changing this has no effect if you’re playing with Anti-Aliasing off or at SMAA 1X.
• NVIDIA DLSS: We prefer to set this to performance, however you may want to see what gives you the best options between everything that’s available. For 1080p gaming we recommend either ‘performance’ or ‘balanced’.
• Depth of Field: This blurs objects in the distance, and that’s not good for visual clarity so you should probably disable this.
• World Motion Blur: Motion blur just serves to make games look more cinematic and it causes visual noise. Disable this.
• Weapon Motion Blur: You want to avoid motion blur in competitive games whenever you can, so disabling this is a good idea.
• Film Grain: Some games add filters to make everything look more cinematic. Set this to 0.00 since it can make things look less clear and has absolutely no other use.

Conclusion

Call of Duty: Warzone is a decently optimized game, and with a myriad of graphical options to tweak it should run on a wide variety of PC setups. With our settings guide you’ve got a nice baseline so that your setup is ready to help you become the most feared operator in Warzone.

Good luck out there, stay frosty, and thanks for reading!