Warzone 2 has finally landed, and you don’t even need a graphics card to shoot your shot. However, just because you can doesn’t mean your should, and playing without a GPU makes the free-to-play battle royale look like a PS2 game.
Conducted by RandomGaminginHD, the Warzone 2 no GPU experiment trades the best graphics card options for an AMD Athlon 3000G – a CPU with integrated Radeon Vega 3 graphics. As you’d expect, pulling off the gaming PC party trick requires the lowest settings and upscaling shenanigans, but as unsightly as the video footage appears, it still feels like a miracle.
It’s needless to say that the hardware enthusiast doesn’t follow our best Warzone 2 settings guide, instead opting for the lowest available and a resolution of 710 x 400. In a way, the combination transforms the experience into a Call of Duty demake, with blocky visuals and textures that’d feel at home on an old CRT. Of course, the compromise is all in the name of frame rates, and the configuration helps boost fps to around 38.
Sure, if you’re rocking the best gaming monitor for competitive play, just under 40fps isn’t going to cut it. Yet, many would still consider anything over 30 to be playable, and the fact it’s possible without any sort of graphics card is impressive. Naturally, you’ll be able to churn out even more frames if you use a newer chip, so if you find yourself stuck on a desert island with only a Zen 4 CPU to hand, you’ll be in luck.
RandomGaminginHD’s latest experiment is another testament to the best gaming CPU candidates, as there’s a surprising number of modern games that’ll run without a dedicated GPU. Whether you’re looking to explore No Man’s Sky without a graphics card or swing through the city in Spider-Man: Remastered, splashing out on expensive AMD and Nvidia parts is anything but a requisite.
Looking to hit the ground running with the latest CoD? Check out Warzone 2 system requirements and help the shooter shine on your system.