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

1080p Performance – Benchmark Results

In this review, we need to highlight one thing; that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s performance is highly variable on PC. For this reason, we decided to add a “Maximum framerate” to our benchmark charts. This is to highlight how much framerates can vary over a small section of gameplay, and how useless “but I can get X framerate in this game” arguments are not very useful. 

To benchmark Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, we tested an area in mission 5 of the game’s campaign. This level is called “clean house”. This mission is highly repeatable and offers some of the lowest framerates that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare can offer. We have seen similar minimum framerates in multiplayer, so please don’t consider these benchmarks as “only applies to the campaign”. 

What must be said here is that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare runs great on PC. Every card we tested was able to run with an average framerate of over 60FPS at Max settings (without DXR shadows). Only our GTX 1060 Strix dipped below 60FPS in our benchmark runs, and even then it stayed in the 50s with its 99th percentile framerates.  

Below we can also see that Modern Warfare favour Radeon graphics cards in a big way. Our RX 580 beats our Geforce GTX 1060 by a large margin, our RX Vega 56 can match Nvidia’s RTX 2060, and our RX 5700 can surpass its Nvidia counterpart with ease. While we will note that our RX 5700 is PowerColor’s overclocked Red Devil Model, while Nvidia’s GTX 2060 Founders Edition is a reference/stock design, this kind of performance difference is more than what a mere factory overclock can provide. Despite Modern Warfare’s RTX advertising, this game favours Radeon.