WARDOGS PC settings guide: graphics, FPS and launch options

Which WARDOGS settings cost frames, which ones change nothing, and which launch options are worth typing? We went through the files the game itself ships: the scalability config that defines every quality tier, the engine config, and the settings descriptions BULKHEAD wrote for the menu (Season 1 game files). Everything below follows from them.

Short version. Disable Picture-in-Picture Scope, use DLAA or DLSS Quality on an RTX card, keep Shadows and View Distance on Medium, set Particle Spawn Rate to Low instead of Potato, and add -nogpucrashdebugging to your launch options. Leave out -NoAnalytics and -precache: we found no sign that either does anything in WARDOGS.

Quick setup#

Setting	Our pick	Why
Picture-in-Picture Scope	Disabled	The game renders the world a second time while you look through a scope
Anti-aliasing method	DLSS (DLAA or Quality) on RTX, FSR on Radeon RX 9000	Sharpest image for the cost
NVIDIA Reflex	Enabled	Lower input latency; Frame Generation requires it
VSync	Off	VSync adds input latency
Mesh Detail	Medium	Low switches Nanite tessellation off; High and Overkill are identical
View Distance	Medium	High and Overkill share the same draw distance
Shadows	Medium	Potato deletes shadows, volumetric fog and cloud shadows
Reflections	Low	Low and Medium are identical; Potato removes reflections entirely
Particle Spawn Rate	Low	Same particle cut as Potato, but tracers stay smooth
Post-processing	Low	Potato drops ambient occlusion and local exposure
Texture Streaming	Match your VRAM	Pool sizes per tier in the textures section below

How the quality tiers work#

Every quality slider has five steps: Potato, Low, Medium, High and Overkill. Potato sits below Low and follows its own rules: on several settings it switches a feature off instead of lowering it a notch. Overkill sits above High, and on View Distance, Mesh Detail and Character textures it adds nothing over High.

Overall Quality has an Auto-detect Hardware button. BULKHEAD describes it as a developer-recommended setup that aims for a smooth 60 FPS on your hardware. Start there, then adjust single settings; the preset flips to Custom on your first change.

Bakurani at sunset: a church on a hill above a sunflower field, smoke and helicopters in the haze — Bakurani loading-screen art. Haze and long shadows like these hang on the Shadows setting: Potato removes both. © BULKHEAD

Lowering Foliage will not thin out the grass you lie in. The config pins grass density to the same value on every tier.

Gameplay settings#

Field of view and weapon model#

Field Of View (FOV): 100 suits most monitors. A narrower view draws fewer objects, so on a very weak PC dropping toward 60 wins a few frames. Cut other settings first: at 60 you lose sight of anyone flanking you from the edge of the screen.
Weapon View Model Scale: maximum. A higher value makes your gun smaller on screen, so you see more of the world around it.
First Person FOV – Vehicles low, Third Person FOV – Vehicles high. A tighter first-person view helps you aim from inside a vehicle; a wide third-person view shows what is driving up beside you.

Aim Down Sight (FOV)#

This option decides how sights with less than 3.25x magnification react to your FOV slider:

Affected: low-power sights follow your FOV. At FOV 100 a Kobra Reflex, Holographic Sight or CQ-2x Prism Combat Scope shows more around the reticle, and targets look a little smaller.
Independent: those sights use a fixed base FOV, so a red dot zooms the same amount whatever your slider says.

From the Spectr 4x upward both modes behave the same. Pick Affected if you want peripheral vision on red dots, Independent if you want bigger targets.

Picture-in-Picture Scope#

A scoped sniper rifle resting in tall grass at the edge of a sunlit forest — Sniper Showdown loading-screen art. With Picture-in-Picture on, a scope like this one costs you a second render of the whole world. © BULKHEAD

Turn it off. With PiP on, telescopic sights get their own FOV and you keep a sharp view around the lens, but the game draws the world twice. BULKHEAD's own description calls the performance hit significant and recommends disabling PiP on most systems. The exact loss depends on your GPU and the map; you feel it most on long glass like the 6x Precision Rifle Scope or the 6-10x Scope MRAD.

Display and latency#

Setting	Our pick	Notes
Display Mode	Fullscreen	Windowed Fullscreen if you alt-tab a lot
Resolution	Native	Windowed Fullscreen locks it to your desktop; use Resolution Scale instead
Frame Limit	Unlimited with Frame Generation, otherwise a cap you can hold	A steady cap gives smoother frame pacing than a bouncing uncapped rate
VSync	Off
NVIDIA Reflex	Enabled	Enabled + Boost also keeps GPU clocks high when you are CPU-bound, at the cost of power draw
Main Menu FPS Limit	Keep a limit	It only affects menus
Brightness	Calibrate	Raise it until the Wardogs logo on the left is barely visible
Sharpness	To taste	Around 1.2 sharpens without visible halos

Display Mode comes down to alt-tab habits. The game's own description says Fullscreen runs slightly faster, while Windowed Fullscreen switches between apps without a black-screen pause and usually costs little in a match. Try Fullscreen first and switch if alt-tab hitches annoy you.

Keep Main Menu FPS Limit on. It only caps the frame rate in the main menu to reduce GPU load. Turning it off gains nothing in a match and makes your card work harder between rounds.

Anti-aliasing and upscaling#

Do not run without anti-aliasing: trees, wires and shadow edges turn into crawling pixels. The Anti-aliasing method menu offers six options:

Method	What it is	Our take
FXAA	Cheapest, blurs edges at native resolution	Low-end PCs only
TAA	Runs on anything, a little soft in motion	Fallback
NVIDIA DLSS	AI reconstruction, RTX cards only	First choice on RTX
AMD FSR	Runs on any GPU, FSR 4 on compatible hardware	First choice on Radeon RX 9000
Intel XeSS	Best on Intel Arc, works on most GPUs	Worth a test on older Radeons
None	No anti-aliasing	Avoid

The game lists the internal render resolution for each DLSS mode:

DLSS mode	Renders at
DLAA	100% (native)
Quality	66%
Balanced	58%
Performance	50%
Ultra Performance	33%

RTX with headroom: DLAA gives the sharpest picture. Need frames? Quality, then Balanced. Ultra Performance renders a third of the pixels and looks soft. If DLAA leaves ghosting trails behind fast movement on your card, step down to Quality.
Radeon: FSR 4 needs an RX 9000-series card. On RX 7000 and older the game uses an earlier FSR version, so compare it with XeSS before you settle.
XeSS: on some cards it flickers on static objects, on others its Native Anti-Aliasing mode gives the cleanest edges. Test it on your own GPU.

Frame Generation#

DLSS-G (DLSS Frame Generation) needs NVIDIA Reflex enabled and Frame Limit set to Unlimited; the game blocks it otherwise. Modes: Dynamic and On2X through On6X. Settings above 2X are Multi Frame Generation, which needs an RTX 50-series card.

Frame Generation smooths motion, it does not cut latency. Generated frames carry none of your input, and the technique adds a small delay that Reflex offsets. Turn it on when you already hold around 60 FPS on a high-refresh monitor; it will not make a struggling PC feel responsive.

Quality settings explained#

The right column shows what the config actually changes between tiers.

Setting	Our pick	What the tiers change
Mesh Detail	Medium	Low switches off Nanite tessellation and lowers mesh density; Potato also hides small decorative objects. High equals Overkill
View Distance	Medium	Draw distance 50% on Potato and Low, 75% on Medium, 100% on High and Overkill
Shading	High for looks, Low for FPS	Low and Potato switch water to a cheaper version; Potato also drops global distance fields
Global Illumination	Disabled	Lumen bounce lighting only runs on Overkill; Low to High use cheaper distance-field AO. Some menus do not show this option at all
Shadows	Medium	Potato turns dynamic shadows off and removes volumetric fog and cloud shadows; Low keeps the fog
Reflections	Low	Low and Medium are identical screen-space reflections, High sharpens them, Overkill uses Lumen. Potato removes reflections
Effects	Any	In this build all five Effects tiers carry the same values, so this slider changes nothing
Particle Spawn Rate	Low	See below
Post-processing	Low	Potato drops ambient occlusion, light shafts and local exposure, which explains its flat, harsh contrast
Bloom	Off	Cheap either way; off keeps muzzle glare and sun glow down

Ozeti stadium seen from above, with tree lines and hills fading into the distance — Ozeti loading-screen art. View Distance mostly changes far terrain and tree lines like these; BULKHEAD keeps fixed draw distances for most of the world. © BULKHEAD

View Distance is the classic trap. BULKHEAD's own description says most of the world uses fixed draw distances for gameplay fairness, so High mostly adds far scenery on maps like Ozeti and does not reveal hidden enemies sooner. Medium is the sweet spot.

Particle Spawn Rate: Low beats Potato#

Zestafona port: helicopters over cranes and containers, black smoke rising from an explosion — Zestafona loading-screen art. Battle smoke like this looks the same on every Particle Spawn Rate tier. © BULKHEAD

Potato looks like the obvious pick if you want smoke and explosions to hide fewer enemies. The config shows why it is not:

The setting skips gameplay effects. The game excludes smoke and muzzle flashes from it, so an M18 Smoke Grenade: White blocks the same view on every tier. If your own muzzle flash bothers you, fit a flash hider or a suppressor.
Low already sets the ambient particle rate (dust, sparks, debris) to zero, exactly like Potato. Potato goes one step further and turns off tracer interpolation, so tracers move at the 30 Hz simulation rate and stutter across the screen.

Pick Low: you get every frame Potato saves and keep smooth tracers.

Textures and VRAM#

Texture Streaming sets how much video memory the game reserves for textures. The pool sizes come from the config; the last column is our rule of thumb.

Texture Streaming	Texture pool	Good for
Potato	310 MB	2–3 GB cards
Low	1.28 GB	4 GB
Medium	2 GB	6 GB
High	3 GB	8 GB
Overkill	6 GB	12 GB and up

Potato is too low for a mid-range card. It cuts the texture pool to 310 MB, a quarter of Low, so surfaces stay blurry for no real gain. On a 6 GB card take Medium, on 4 GB take Low.

World, Character, Effects textures: High. Character on High already loads full-resolution textures, so Overkill adds nothing there.
Texture Filtering sets anisotropic filtering: off on Potato and Low, 2x on Medium, 4x on High, 8x on Overkill. Medium is a fair default. Anisotropic filtering costs little on current GPUs, so try High if roads and fields blur at shallow angles.

Launch options#

Steam → right-click WARDOGS → Properties → General → Launch Options. Separate options with spaces.

Worth adding#

Option	What it does and when to use it
`-nogpucrashdebugging`	Turns off GPU crash debugging. WARDOGS ships with it switched on in its engine config, so this flag removes real overhead. Use it always, unless you are recording a GPU crash for a bug report
`-corelimit=N`	Caps how many CPU cores the engine spreads its work across. Use it if the game stutters while you stream or record on the same PC; N = your physical core count
`-ngxdisable`	Turns off NVIDIA NGX, the runtime behind DLSS and DLAA. Use it on an NVIDIA card when you do not use DLSS; it changes nothing on AMD or Intel

Window and resolution#

Option	What it does
`-fullscreen` / `-windowed`	Starts the game in that mode
`-Res=1920x1080`	Starting resolution; `-ResX=1920 -ResY=1080` works too
`-WinX=0 -WinY=0`	Window position in windowed mode
`-SAVEWINPOS=1`	Remembers the window position between launches

Unreal Engine reads the window position only from -WinX and -WinY. -PosX and -PosY are not engine flags and do nothing.

Troubleshooting#

Option	What it does
`-nosound`	Starts without audio. If the stutter disappears, reinstall your audio driver
`-log`	Opens Unreal's live log window; release builds may strip it

Skip these#

-NoAnalytics: skip it. It often gets recommended as a switch that turns off telemetry and saves a little CPU and network traffic. It is not a documented Unreal Engine flag, and we found no trace of it in the game's files. WARDOGS sends its analytics and login events through its own services, configured in the game's config, so there is no sign the flag switches them off. Adding it does no harm, but expect no extra frames and no change to the game's data collection.

Option	Why skip it
`-precache`	Epic does not document it, and we could not confirm it in WARDOGS. The game warms its shader pipelines on its own; hitches in the first minutes of a match come from that cache filling up
`-sm5`	The client ships only Shader Model 6 (DirectX 12) shaders, with no SM5 set to fall back on. The official minimum is a GTX 1660 or RX 590, and every card that runs WARDOGS already uses SM6
`-sm6`	Already the default

Ready to copy#

Everyone:

-nogpucrashdebugging

NVIDIA card without DLSS:

-nogpucrashdebugging -ngxdisable

Streaming or recording on the same PC (8 = your physical core count):

-nogpucrashdebugging -corelimit=8

All numbers in this guide come from the Season 1 game files. Patches can move them; we will update the guide when they do. For optics, attachments and vehicles, browse the database.