2021 was the year of first-person shooters as the biggest franchises all released their big hitters. Call of Duty Vanguard, Battlefield 2042, and Halo Infinite were poised to go against each other in what would be the first time for a battle of this kind in a long time. However, the game that was slated to be the least impressive out of the three, Halo Infinite, ended up surprising everyone and taking the crown for the best FPS game of the year. And, while Battlefield 2042 did not impress many critics, it was still good enough to get 2nd place behind Halo Infinite.
So, where did Activision falter with Call of Duty: Vanguard? Well, in all honesty, the game itself is not as bad as people might make you think. In fact, one might argue that Vanguard is a better game than Battlefield 2042 in terms of features and finishing. However, since the expectations of the game were much higher as the previous entries like Black Ops Cold War and Modern Warfare were exceptionally good, Vanguard being rather average definitely underwhelmed a lot of people.
Despite the lukewarm reception from the critics though, Call of Duty: Vanguard still managed to be the most successful game of the year and topped the NPD sales charts for last year despite coming out in November. These staggeringly high numbers mean that Call of Duty has now been the best-selling franchise for 13 consecutive years, which is just insane to think about.
Not only that but the game’s campaign also received some good reviews to continue the streak. And, while the multiplayer is not great, Sledgehammer Games is hard at work to improve the gameplay experience. This shift of focus has also prompted the developer to delay the release of Season 2 of Vanguard and Warzone in order to fix the game’s current issues first.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard might change Call of Duty forever
With that said, the biggest bombshell of the year perhaps is the Call of Duty franchise potentially going exclusive to the Xbox platform. In a deal worth over $68 Billion, Microsoft is set to acquire Activision Blizzard and incorporate it into Xbox Game Studios. This is hands down the biggest acquisition that the video game industry has ever seen. And, once it is closed during the fiscal year 2023, we can expect a lot of Activision Blizzard games to make their way over to Xbox Game Pass including Call of Duty.
Additionally, the dip in Call of Duty’s form and the generally low enthusiasm around the franchise is also due to the ongoing sexual harassment and fratboy culture lawsuit from the state of California against the publisher. And, despite multiple demands, protests, and walkouts from the employees, there doesn’t seem to be any substantial change in the company’s culture. Many have asked for the resignation of CEO Bobby Kotick, who has been deemed largely to blame for the current inaction against the company’s toxic culture.
With this acquisition though, the Head of Gaming at Microsoft, Phil Spencer, will directly oversee Activision Blizzard and hopefully, that will bring a positive change within the work environment of Activision as it has done for many of the other Xbox studios. Not only that but reports also suggest that once the deal is finalized, Bobby Kotick is expected to step down from his role as the CEO of Activision Blizzard, which is a relief for many.
Many reports have also claimed that to cut down crunch and disorganization, Xbox might reduce the release cadence of Call of Duty games from its usual yearly release. Instead, a new Call of Duty game coming out every 2 years might make more sense as not only does it give more time to developers, but it will also free up a studio like Raven or other support studios like Toys for Bob to pursue their own separate projects. And, with the Call of Duty franchise making its way to Game Pass, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities especially when you factor in the xCloud Xbox Cloud Gaming as well.
Call of Duty: Vanguard has a lot of performance issues
All of that is still over a year away though and the fact of the matter is that Call of Duty: Vanguard is in a bit of a dire situation and needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Players have been reporting a ton of glitches and bugs within the game and while some of them have been patched out, most still remain rampant within the game. Not only that but the game also suffers from a lot of optimization and performance issues on both consoles and PC and things like low FPS, lag, stutters, frame drops, and crashes are frequent.
However, since the situation of these problems is rather dire, it’ll probably take a long time before Sledgehammer is able to fully iron out these issues. And, maybe by that time, the next Call of Duty game might be around the corner as well. No one wants to wait that long though and thus until Sledgehammer Games manages to fix these issues, there are a few things that you can try to improve the performance of Call of Duty: Vanguard. So, here are some fixes for the performance issues like lag, low framerate, FPS drops, and crashes in Call of Duty: Vanguard.
Call of Duty: Vanguard System Requirements
Before we get into the actual fixes themselves, you need to make sure that your PC is powerful enough to run Call of Duty: Vanguard in the first place. If you’ve played any Call of Duty game released within the past 5 years, you’d know that the visuals of the series have not really seen a big jump lately. The only big changes we have seen in the engine are the addition of better lighting and real-time raytracing. So, if you were able to run Call of Duty smoothly a few years ago, this shouldn’t be a problem either. The official system requirements are also low enough for most people with budget PC builds or newer integrated GPUs. Of course, if you want to increase the resolution or play with raytracing, you need the latest NVIDIA RTX 3000 or AMD Radeon RX6000 series graphics cards.
Minimum System Requirements:
- OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10 64-Bit (latest update)
- CPU: Intel Core i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300
- RAM: 8 GB RAM
- STORAGE SPACE: 36 GB (Multiplayer and Zombies only), 177 GB all game modes
- GRAPHICS CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon RX 470
- VIDEO MEMORY: 2 GB
Recommended System Requirements:
- OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10 64-Bit (latest update) or Windows 11 64-Bit (latest update)
- CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
- RAM: 12 GB RAM
- STORAGE SPACE: 177 GB
- GRAPHICS CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580
- VIDEO MEMORY: 4 GB
Competitive System Requirements:
- OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10 64-Bit (latest update) or Windows 11 64-Bit (latest update)
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
- RAM: 16 GB RAM
- STORAGE SPACE: 177 GB
- GRAPHICS CARD: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070/RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 5700XT
- VIDEO MEMORY: 8 GB
Ultra 4K System Requirements:
- OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10 64-Bit (latest update) or Windows 11 64-Bit (latest update)
- CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K or AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
- RAM: 16 GB RAM
- STORAGE SPACE: 177 GB
- GRAPHICS CARD: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
- VIDEO MEMORY: 10 GB
1. Roll Back NVIDIA GPU Driver Version
When Call of Duty: Vanguard was released in November, NVIDIA released its game-ready drivers for the game that enhanced the performance and optimized NVIDIA Graphics Cards for it. However, as new GPU driver patches have been pushed out, performance on high-end NVIDIA GPUs has somehow gotten worse. Players have seen a massive performance dip during the past few months making the game unplayable at times. So, if you are one of those people, a good solution is to roll back the driver version for your NVIDIA GPU to version 472.12 or 471.68. In order to do that, head over to the NVIDIA support website and download the particular drivers.
If you are on team red though and have an AMD Radeon GPU, updating your drivers is actually the way to go as newer drivers reportedly perform much better in Call of Duty: Vanguard. So, if your AMD drivers are not up to date, either download them via the official AMD support website or update them via Radeon Control Panel.
2. Set Optimal Graphics Settings for Call of Duty: Vanguard
Call of Duty: Vanguard is a rarely expansive title when it comes to the range of visual options it offers. There is a lot of room for tweaking and setting the visual and performance targets that suit your needs. And, while the default settings are good enough for a lot of people, they leave a lot of performance on the table. So, the smart choice is to optimize these graphics settings within the game to get the best visual to performance ratio. Not only does Call of Duty: Vanguard offer traditional graphical options but it also adds some newer features like AMD FidelityFX CAS to help those with less powerful GPUs. In addition to that, a newer version of DLSS with a sharpening scale is also available in-game to boost performance and adjust the visuals.
We have tested out a bunch of different graphical configurations for Call of Duty Vanguard on our test machines and have found the optimal settings for the game. These settings are a great starting point for anyone with a modern mid-range PC and from this point, you can tweak further to improve visuals or performance based on your own specifications. We believe that with these settings, the game looks visually stunning while retaining much of the performance that’s necessary for a modern competitive first-person shooter.
Display:
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080.
- Refresh Rate: Set according to your monitor specifications.
- V-Sync: Off.
- Gamma: 2.1
- On-Demand Texture Streaming: Off
Quality:
- Dynamic Resolution: On
- Texture Resolution: Medium
- Anisotropic Filter: High
- Particle Quality and Resolution: Medium
- Bullet Impact: Off
- Tesselation: Off
- LOD Range: Long/High
- Turn all Shadow settings to Low (but keep the sun and spot shadows enabled)
- Ambient Occlusion: On
- Particle Lighting: Low
- SSR: On
- NVIDIA DLSS: On (if you have an NVIDIA GPU)
- FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0: On.
- FidelityFX CAS: On (1.0)
- Depth of Field: Off
- Set your VRAM target to 90% or below in order to get rid of frequent frame drops and stutters.
Gameplay:
- FOV: 100
- Camera Movement: Least
- Motion Blur: Off
- NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: On
Call of Duty Vanguard is now out on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. You can check it out right here.