Call of Duty: Modern Warfare PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Optimisation Tips – Which settings have the most impact? 

 
When testing Modern Warfare, we ran our benchmarking location using a variety of graphics settings using our PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 Red Devil graphics card and compared the game’s performance when adjusting most of the game’s graphical settings. Doing this gave us the results below. 

No single graphical option in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has an insane impact on performance. Don’t expect a “lowering this setting increases performance by over 20%” kind of deal here. Each setting in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is carefully balanced to deliver great visuals at a worthwhile performance cost. Outside of DXR raytracing, there is no single setting that could be called a “performance killer”. 

If you want to increase your Modern Warfare performance you have two simple options, turn the game’s Ambient Occlusion setting to MDAO (or off), or disable Anti-Aliasing. Every other setting has a minor performance impact, which will force PC gamers to make cuts to several graphical settings to have a notable impact on Modern Warfare’s performance. 

Another way to gain performance is to adjust Modern Warfare’s resolution settings. For example, PC gamers can adjust Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s resolution from 100% of 4K to 90% of 4K. This changes the game’s internal resolution from 2160×3840 to 1944×3,456, which results in a 19% drop in pixel count. UI elements and text will still be rendered at 4K, or whatever your native resolution is, but you should expect a significant performance boost. 

Options like tesselation are designed for older graphics cards; which tend to be more limited in terms of tesselation performance than their modern counterparts. This means that modern GPUs should be able to have this setting set to all without any issues, though users of older graphics cards (especially older Radeon cards) should expect these settings to have a larger performance impact.