Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 PC Performance Review and Settings Guide

1080p Performance  

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a game that is designed to run well on a variety of hardware configurations. Even when using the game’s Extreme Preset, Modern Warfare 2 runs at near 60 FPS average framerates on graphics cards like AMD’s RX 5500 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 1660 Super. Not bad for a new game release. 

With lower graphics settings, graphics cards like the GTX 1660 Super can easily achieve framerates that stay above 60 FPS at all times. Setting particle quality to low would dramatically increase Call of Duty’s 1st percentile framerates, and a few other settings decreases would bring the game to a much higher average framerate. 

Below, we can see that AMD graphics cards often outperform their Nvidia counterparts, with AMD’s RX 6800 XT delivering a higher average framerate than Nvidia’s RTX 3080 with DLSS set to balanced. That said, NVidia’s RTX 3080 with DLSS enabled has a more stable framerate, mostly because it effectively lowers the impact of the game’s particles by lowering the game (and therefore the particle effect’s) resolution.