How Will ‘Call of Duty: Warzone’ Run on Nintendo Switch?

The ongoing saga around future Call of Duty titles appearing on platforms other than Xbox has taken an intriguing new twist. In an effort to reassure the FTC, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have confirmed that over the next ten years, they’re planning to port any new Call of Duty titles to Nintendo’s consoles.

So, chances are good we’ll see a version of Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 making its way to Nintendo hardware sometime soon. You’ve probably already foreseen a couple of obvious problems here: any Switch port of Warzone would have to get the game running on what’s essentially a mid-2010s tablet processor. So, let’s take Warzone as a case study and theorize how it would run on Switch.

Can the Switch even run Call of Duty: Warzone?

Nvidia lists the minimum specs to run Warzone on PC as a GeForce GTX 670, an Intel i3 processor (or AMD FX-6300), 8GB of RAM and 175GB of hard drive space.

Right away, we’re running into a lot of problems getting Warzone on Switch. The Switch’s custom Maxwell GPU and ARM-based CPU are difficult to directly compare to PC specs as it’s custom hardware, though the system is roughly half as powerful as the minimum specs machine. Similarly, the Switch contains 4GB of DD4 SDRAM, half of the minimum amount.

Further hurdles are in hard drive space. Warzone is a notorious hard drive hog, both in its installation size and space for patches. The base model Switch has just 32GB of storage on board (with the more recent OLED a still comparatively small 64GB). Some taxing games like Wolfenstein: The New Colossus mandate an SD card to be able to play them, and we’d expect any Call of Duty to do the same.

However, just because the Switch can’t run Warzone as is, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be cut back in various ways. It’s notable that 2023 will see the release of Call of Duty Warzone: Mobile, which will tweak the game so much that it won’t feature crossplay with consoles and PC. The Switch architecture has similarities to mobile, so perhaps we might see the Mobile work benefit any Switch port.

How would a cut-down Switch Warzone look?

In the right hands, the Switch can punch way above its weight. The most impressive ports are The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and DOOM Eternal, neither of which have any business running on a Switch as well as they do. But a more useful point of comparison are the two big battle royale titles already on the platform: Fortnite and Apex Legends.

Fortnite runs at 30fps and at 1170×660 in handheld mode and 1560×880 in docked on Switch. Graphical settings are below what you’d see on ‘minimum’ on PC, though the game is still very much playable. Draw distance and LOD are quite strict, meaning the game isn’t exactly a looker compared to modern hardware, but it works.

But for Call of Duty, the better comparator is the Switch port of Respawn’s Apex Legends, both games are first-person battle royale titles taking place on large maps combining interior and exterior areas. The games are somewhat different aesthetically, but both aim for a more realistic style than the cartoony Fortnite.

On Switch, Apex Legends aims for 30FPS, but often struggles to hit it, with a dynamic resolution that can drop to 1066×600 in docked and 960×540 minimum handheld. This port also removes a ton of graphical niceties, with low-res textures, short draw distances, low-quality assets (especially foliage) and a drastic paring back of ground object detail.

Running Apex Legends on Switch isn’t pretty and far from the best way to play the game, but it does just about work and we’d expect a Warzone port to function in roughly the same way.