The Season 5 Reloaded update for MW3 and Warzone introduced a range of interesting new content, but it also forced players to enable a graphics setting that increases lag.
Some Call of Duty players logging in following the new update may have noticed they are experiencing more latency than before. A potential cause of this is the change on August 21 that made On-Demand Texture Streaming mandatory.
On-Demand Texture Streaming is a graphics setting found in the Quality tab that uses your internet to download textures as you play. The main advantage of this is that it allows users to have high-quality textures while minimizing the game’s file size.
However, this comes at the cost of potentially increasing lag during gameplay. It’s an additional strain on your network’s bandwidth, which can result in added latency, especially for those with slower connections.
Before the update, On-Demand Texture Streaming could be freely disabled, which was actually recommended for those wanting to maximize performance. However, there are now only two options: Minimal and Optimized.
Optimized makes the game download additional high-quality textures, while Minimal only downloads essential textures. While the latter uses less bandwidth, both use more bandwidth than what was available before the update.
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The Call of Duty community has spoken out against this, with one highly upvoted comment on Reddit expressing, “I hate, and I mean hate On-Demand Texture Streaming. It just makes the game feel laggy af.”
Similarly, another user responded, “Yep, connection to their servers can be absolutely abysmal at times, now with forced texture streaming on top of it? What a joke. Just let me download the 64 GB textures once and be done.”
Several other users in the thread claimed to have experienced increased packet loss since the update went live, while others questioned why this was forced onto the community.
The most common request was for Activision to offer an optional download to store the textures. This approach would give Warzone players the option to choose between a smoother experience with a larger file size or a smaller file size with increased latency.
