The Fix
The underlying cause could be poor optimization by the developers, as many players are experiencing this cap even though their hardware goes far beyond the minimum requirements.
In this guide, we show you a simple tweak that will fix your VRAM capping issues. The fix involves increasing the video memory scale for Warzone and can be done by going to the Call of Duty Modern Warfare folder located in the Documents folder. You will find an .ini file called “adv_options.ini” which you need to edit. The exact location of the file should be C:\Users\Documents\Call of Duty Modern Warfare\players\adv_options.ini.
Open up this file, and you will see “VideoMemoryScale = 0.85”. Note that this number can differ case by case, and is the root cause of the bug. 0.85 is a scaling factor for how much of your available VRAM is going to be used when running Warzone.
For instance, let’s say you have 8GB VRAM, and if the scaling factor is set to 0.85, then 8GB * 0.85 = 6.8GB. This means that you’re capping the VRAM usage at max 6.8GB, and the rest of the capacity is not being used. Increasing the value may fix the issue. We tried this on our Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB card, and it seemed to work. The default video memory scaling value was 0.85 for us, and we changed it to 1.0. There does seem to be some nuance, though, and we do not recommend going all the way to 1.0 if your starting value is very low. Doing that may, in fact, add to your stuttering or lag issues. This is typical of weaker hardware.
This tweak has reportedly worked for both AMD and NVIDIA users, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for Intel as well. If you want more insight regarding your rig’s performance during gameplay, download MSI Afterburner for monitoring and optimization. Afterburner and similar optimization utilities and squeeze a surprising amount of extra power from your hardware.
Default Values
The following is a list of values you should put first and check whether the stuttering issues have been fixed or not.
VideoMemoryScale: 0.55 RendererWorkerCount: 3
The default set of values go for both high-end and low-end PCs. However, if you want to be more precise, then keep on reading.
Value Selection Criteria
Every GPU and hardware has different requirements, and you need to put in the values that suit your specifications best. The following are some of the pre-defined values that we’ve gathered based on the VRAM and CPU cores. For the VideoMemoryScale, we always recommend you select values ranging from 0.55 to 1.0. You will have to play around with this value a bit until that red bar in the game is gone. However, the RendererWorkerCount value must be selected based on the number of CPU cores you have. For example, if you have 16 cores, you should set the RendererWorkerCount to half the number of cores, so in this case, it would be 8. If you have 8 cores, then you should set it as 4. It should always be half the actual number of CPU cores to avoid any “over-burden” on the hardware. Either way, it is a safer practice. If you are unsure how many cores your CPU has, right-click on your taskbar and open up the ‘Task Manager.’
Navigate to the ‘Performance’ tab at the top and you should see CPU on the left-hand side. Click on it and you will see ‘Cores’ below the CPU graph. The logical processor represents the number of threads your CPU has.
We’ve got 8 cores. This means we will set our RendererWorkerCount number to 4. Similarly, you need to check yours and put the value to half of your number of cores. We hope this fixes your VRAM capping issues. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to use the comments section below.
