Call of Duty: Warzone players have noticed something strange and mysterious going on since Season 1 launched last week.
CharlieIntel shared their insight on Twitter:
“Players have noticed that the performance of Call of Duty: Warzone on Steam is worse than that of Battle net and Xbox PC app after Season 01 launch.
Many are reporting that Bnet and Xbox app is giving 100-200FPS+ compared to the Steam version, with some seeing <80FPS on Steam.”
So, before we get started, it should be clear here that we are only talking about playing Call of Duty: Warzone on PC. The Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 Pro alike can not even approach the performance numbers that Call of Duty: Warzone can achieve, even deprecated, on Steam.
But of course, PC gamers are always going to be on the cutting edge of gaming technology. Interestingly, the latest Steam hardware survey finds that those users are still using Nvidia GPUs that can be as old as two years old.
So, PC gamers are not necessarily rushing to get into the AI-powered generation of CPUs, GPUs, and APUs from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and now potentially Qualcomm. Still, with a CPU that can keep pace, the RTX 3060, the most popular GPU coming out of that survey, can definitely push above 100 FPS on 1440p, especially with esports standard games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Valorant.
As CharlieIntel implied, another optimization issue for Call of Duty: Warzone popped up, that may have something to do with what Activision and Microsoft can put in their systems, but not on Steam. There could be a fix that needs approval from Steam to move forward, so players on Microsoft owned platforms can get that fix first.
There’s no point litigating here how Call of Duty constantly runs into issues after they launch, in the peak hours that the games are played. These are the very indications of the game’s success, especially when you consider that unlike the likes of Fortnite, Activision goes through the trouble of releasing a completely new game year on year.
So, we know that Activision will get to these issues in time, and that Call of Duty fans are going to enjoy their time playing anyway. But this could be an indication that the Call of Duty faithful might want to consider stepping away from Steam to get their annual fix.
After all, regardless of how convenient it is, you don’t own your games on Steam, while Microsoft does give you a path to keeping a physical copy of your collection. Alternately, Microsoft does have an offer that could save you a few bucks.
