Modern Warfare 2 PC: Optimal Settings and Upscaling Benchmarks

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 arrived on PC in late 2022 as a technically ambitious game that demands careful tuning. The 2022 reimagining carries forward the franchise's reputation for pushing graphics technology, but it also requires players to navigate a sprawling menu of settings if they want smooth performance on their hardware. A week of benchmarking across multiple GPU architectures reveals both the game's scalability and the specific trade-offs that matter most.

The graphics menu alone contains 38 distinct settings, a number that can overwhelm players trying to optimize without guidance. The game's built-in recommendation system leans toward performance over visual fidelity, which is a reasonable starting point but not necessarily the best compromise for every player. The most impactful settings cluster around texture quality, level of detail, anti-aliasing, and shadow resolution—these four factors drive both visual clarity and frame rate more than most other options. Texture quality alone consumed just over 5GB of video memory in testing, manageable for any GPU with 4GB or more VRAM. Anti-aliasing deserves particular attention: the filmic SMAA T2X option softens jagged edges to mimic a camera lens effect and performs identically to standard SMAA T2X in terms of frame rate, making it the superior choice for image quality. Settings like bullet impacts, weapon motion blur, and depth of field have negligible performance cost and can be left on according to personal preference. Water caustics, which use ray tracing to simulate light refraction, should generally stay disabled unless you have dedicated ray tracing hardware and are willing to accept the performance penalty, particularly in campaign sequences.

The system requirements span four tiers, from a minimum configuration requiring an Intel Core i3-6100 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 paired with a GTX 960 or RX 470, up to an ultra tier demanding an Intel Core i9-9900K or AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with an RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT. The CPU requirements are straightforward: the game needs AVX instruction support, which is standard on nearly all processors from the past decade, and benefits from at least four cores, with six cores being ideal. GPU demands are steeper. A GTX 1060 with 4GB of memory represents the practical floor for 1080p gaming above 60 frames per second with high settings. An RTX 3060 Ti should handle 1440p at similar frame rates, while 4K stability at high settings requires stepping up to an RTX 3070 Ti or equivalent. Storage presents an ongoing challenge: the game ships at 72GB but balloons to 125GB with all content, and the optional high-resolution asset cache can consume an additional 32GB to 64GB depending on your resolution target. Players should expect the total installation to exceed 100GB at launch and potentially reach 200GB as updates accumulate.

Benchmark testing with an Intel Core i5-13600K and 32GB DDR5 memory across 4K, 1440p, and 1080p resolutions revealed how well midrange GPUs perform. Intel's Arc A750, the least powerful card tested, maintained above 60 frames per second at 1440p and showed unexpectedly competitive performance at 4K—a quirk of Arc architecture that performs better as resolution climbs. AMD's RX 6600 XT delivered high refresh rate performance at 1080p. The RTX 3070 came close to 60 frames per second at 4K without upscaling, demonstrating that the game scales reasonably across the hardware spectrum. Frame times remained stable throughout testing, with only isolated spikes, indicating the engine avoids the stuttering problems that plagued some recent releases. Shader compilation should be triggered manually before playing to prevent frame rate hitches during initial gameplay.

Modern Warfare 2 supports three major upscaling technologies: Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution, and Intel's XeSS, plus Nvidia Image Scaling and dynamic resolution options. However, the implementations vary in maturity. FSR is locked to version 1.0, which lags significantly behind FSR 2.0 in both performance and image quality. DLSS uses only the Super Resolution feature, not the Frame Generation capability available in DLSS 3. XeSS adapts to available hardware, running optimally on Intel Arc GPUs with XMX cores but falling back to simpler AI upscaling on other platforms. Testing with an RTX 3070 showed DLSS as the clear winner in both frame rate and visual fidelity, particularly in aggressive quality modes where FSR struggles to render fine details like window lines and tree foliage. XeSS performed surprisingly well without Arc hardware, maintaining image quality closer to DLSS than to FSR. In the highest quality mode, DLSS preserved fine details in grilles and building textures better than competitors. At more aggressive settings, FSR's image degradation became pronounced, while DLSS applied sharpening that kept details crisp. For players with Nvidia hardware, DLSS is the recommended choice. AMD users face a less appealing situation: FSR 1.0 trades noticeable image quality loss for marginal performance gains, making it a difficult recommendation until a potential FSR 2.0 patch arrives. XeSS remains a wildcard, performing better than expected on non-Intel hardware but still behind DLSS in both metrics. The game's upscaling support is comprehensive in breadth but uneven in execution, leaving performance optimization dependent on which GPU you own.