It’s not just you: Warzone 2 PC players are having serious performance issues after this week’s update

warzone 2 season 4
(Image credit: Activision)

If Call of Duty: Warzone has been feeling sluggish over the last few days, it’s probably not your PC’s fault. Players far and wide have been reporting serious drops in performance since the Season 4 Reloaded patch released yesterday, with many experiencing framerate drops between 20-30 fps on Warzone’s newest map, Vondel.

“I've only played Vondel so far and I’m getting fps in the 40s and 30s, I was getting 70 fps before the update,” wrote Cautious_Incident_46 on the Warzone subreddit. “I've set my game on the lowest graphical settings possible and still get horrid fps.”

It seems like the same problems exist for players on high-end systems, too. One redditor with a PC so extravagant it could cover my rent for months (4090, i9 13900KS, 64GB DDR5) says they’ve been steadily experiencing worsening Warzone performance since January, with this week’s update being the worst degradation yet.

God awful fps? from r/CODWarzone

“With this new patch, I am down to 100 fps with tons of variation between 90-120. This is less than that of a current generation console,” wrote user bupivacaine. “This is absolutely embarrassing … This most recent patch has rendered the game borderline unplayable on PC.”

While I don’t see how running anything at 100+ fps could be considered “unplayable,” it is a real problem. Folks are cranking down their graphics settings to the bare minimum and still seeing the same drops, so this probably falls more under a bug than an optimization decision we’re stuck with. 

Thankfully, Warzone lead studio Raven Software is aware of the performance issues and is investigating solutions, according to its offical Trello board. Vondel seems to be the worst culprit, so avoiding that map might help until there’s a proper fix. 

Morgan Park
Staff Writer

Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.

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