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

Conclusion – If you are seeing large framerate dips, please, turn particle quality to low

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has had a controversial launch on PC, with Nvidia’s latest GPU drivers causing stability issues while the game’s exclusion of ray tracing has infuriated graphics junkies. That said, Nvidia’s driver issues can be alleviated by using older driver versions, and if we are honest, ray tracing does not really need to be part of a competitive online shooter. Simply put, framerate is king within competitive shooters, and ray tracing is an easy way to reduce your system’s performance in most instances.

In all, Modern Warfare 2 runs incredibly well on PC, assuming that you have a graphics card with plenty of VRAM. 8GB graphics cards will have no issues modern Warfare 2’s VRAM loads until you reach 4K resolutions, with 10GB+ GPUs being preferable beyond that point. 6GB graphics cards will work with lowered texture and streaming settings, but we would suggest that users of graphics cards with 6GB of less of VRAM target display resolutions like 1080p. 

If there is one thing that became very clear in our analysis, it is that particle effects can have a huge impact on Modern Warfare 2’s performance, be it from a nearby air strike, smoke grenades, or other sources. Setting particle quality to low will dramatically increase Modern Warfare 2’s 1st and 5th percentile framerates, and make the game’s overall framerates a lot more stable. Beyond that volumetric effects and ambient occlusion settings are an easy way for most PC gamers to notably increase Modern Warfare 2’s framerates on PC. 

Resolution scaling/upscaling is available in Modern Warfare 2, with the game supporting DLSS, FSR 1.0 and XeSS at launch. Sadly, XeSS would not work for us on AMD or Nvidia hardware, and we currently do not have any Intel graphics cards for testing. In general, AMD graphics cards outperform their Nvidia counterparts in Modern Warfare 2, though Nvidia’s support for DLSS gives Geforce RTX graphics cards an edge, especially given the fact that Modern Warfare 2 does not support AMD’s FSR 2.0 technology. 

We think it is an odd decision that Infinity Ward has not implemented AMD’s FSR 2.0 technology into Modern Warfare 2, as it should deliver better visual results than FSR 1.0. Thankfully, Call of Duty’s sharp default presentation makes it well suited to FSR 1.0 upscaling, FSR 2.0 support would have been preferable, as would XeSS support that actually works. 

With a large number of graphical settings on PC and support for a broad range of upscaling options, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is, for the most part, a well designed PC game that runs well on a variety of hardware configurations. Just make sure particle detail is set to low and you should be in for a great time. 

For Nvidia users, we expect a new GeForce Hotfix driver to be released soon to address stability issues in Modern Warfare 2. For now, GeForce users should utilise Nvidia’s GeForce 522.25 drivers instead of their newer 526.47 drivers. 

You can join the discussion on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s PC version on the OC3D Forums.