Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC Performance Review

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is finally here, and Infinity Ward has gone all out with the visuals this time around. The latest entry takes the action to the Korean Peninsula, with North Korea launching a full-scale invasion, while Captain Price is fighting his own battles halfway across the world. The campaign takes you through different locations, including Korea, New York, Paris, and Mumbai, with plenty of familiar faces returning.

I've been playing the campaign on PC, and one thing that immediately stood out to me was just how good the game looks. The explosions, the lighting, the character models, and especially the cutscenes are a huge step up. Some of those cinematic sequences almost look like they belong in a movie, and the amount of detail in characters like Price and Gaz is quite impressive. The little kid in me who grew up playing Modern Warfare 3 would probably have a hard time believing these are some of the same characters.

But all of that visual fidelity comes at a cost, and I wanted to see how well Modern Warfare 4 actually runs on PC. So, I spent some time testing the game on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 at 4K, switching between graphics presets, enabling DLSS and Multi Frame Generation, and pushing ray tracing to see how much of a difference it makes.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC Performance Review

Modern Warfare 4 PC Requirements and Testing Rig

Modern Warfare 4 has fairly reasonable requirements at the lower end. Activision lists the GTX 970/1060, Radeon RX 470, or Intel Arc A580 as the minimum GPUs, alongside 8GB of RAM. The recommended specifications move up to an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6600 XT with 16GB of RAM, targeting 90fps in multiplayer at High settings. The game also requires an SSD with 115GB of available storage.

Ray tracing is where things get considerably more demanding. For 4K upscaled gameplay with High ray tracing, Activision recommends an RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 9070 XT, with 16GB of VRAM and 32GB of system memory.

Component	Hardware
CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070
Motherboard	MSI Z890 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi
RAM	48GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5
Storage	WD Black SN850X 2TB
PSU	MSI MAG A1000GL 1000W
Monitor	Acer Nitro XV275K P5 4K 160Hz

For my testing, I paired the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K on the MSI Z890 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi motherboard. The system also features 48GB of Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5 RAM, a 2TB WD Black SN850X NVMe SSD, and an MSI MAG A1000GL power supply. The game was tested at 4K on the Acer Nitro XV275K P5 Mini LED gaming monitor.

One thing worth mentioning here is that while Modern Warfare 4 comes with a built-in benchmarking tool, it is limited to Multiplayer. Since I wanted to test campaign performance, I recorded all the numbers below during gameplay in the Defection section of the story, which has a lot of enemies and explosions. Every test was conducted at 4K, primarily using the Ultra and Basic graphics presets.

Modern Warfare 4 Graphics Settings and Features

If there's one thing I really appreciate about Modern Warfare 4's PC version, it's the graphics menu. There's a lot to play around with here, and unlike games that give you a handful of presets and leave you to figure out everything else, Modern Warfare 4 does a pretty good job of explaining what each setting actually does.

You get five graphics presets to choose from: Minimum, Basic, Balanced, Ultra, and Extreme. Beyond that, you can manually adjust individual settings, enable ray tracing, and use DLSS 4.5 with Multi Frame Generation going all the way up to 6x. RTX 50-series users also get the option to switch between the Transformer and CNN models for DLSS, which is a nice addition if you want more control over image quality.

What I particularly like is the level of detail the settings page provides. Select an option, and the game explains what it changes, alongside indicators showing its impact on VRAM, CPU, and GPU usage. There's also a dedicated VRAM scale target and an estimated usage meter that updates as you adjust settings.

For instance, the game was estimating around 4.37GB of VRAM for Modern Warfare 4 in one of my configurations, while other applications accounted for another 2.54GB. I could see the total against the roughly 11.66GB available on the RTX 5070. It's a useful little addition, especially if you're trying to figure out how far you can push textures and other demanding settings without running out of video memory.

The game also supports background shader preloading, helping prepare shaders without requiring you to sit through the entire process before playing. There's plenty to appreciate here, although I did run into a couple of rather odd limitations.

For starters, enabling ray tracing disables DLSS upscaling. So, while you get access to both technologies individually, you cannot use them together. Variable Rate Shading is another setting that gets locked when DLSS is active, and ray tracing introduces a similar restriction.

I'm not entirely sure why players aren't given more freedom here, especially when the rest of the graphics menu offers so much control. And as the performance numbers will show, ray tracing is one area where having DLSS available would have been particularly helpful.

Modern Warfare 4 PC Performance: RTX 5070 at 4K

I started with the Ultra preset at 4K, with DLSS enabled, Frame Generation disabled, and ray tracing turned off. The RTX 5070 averaged 67fps, with a 53fps 1% low. GPU usage was sitting at 99%, while temperatures hovered around 72 degrees Celsius. CPU usage was considerably lower at 29%, with temperatures around 61 degrees Celsius.

That's a pretty good result considering how impressive Modern Warfare 4 looks. The game was already running above 60fps on average without relying on generated frames, and I was quite happy with how it looked at Ultra. The lighting, explosions, smoke effects, and character detail all come together nicely, and I didn't feel the need to start lowering settings immediately.

Turning on 3x Multi Frame Generation changed the numbers considerably. The average jumped to 147fps, while the 1% low improved to 79fps. That's an increase of almost 120% in average frame rate compared to the first run, with GPU usage and temperatures remaining practically identical.

Of course, 147fps with Multi Frame Generation isn't the same as the GPU rendering 147 traditional frames every second. But the important thing here is that the starting frame rate was already reasonably healthy, which makes Frame Generation a much more useful addition.

Here's how all five configurations performed:

4K Campaign Performance

Graphics Preset	Ray Tracing	DLSS Upscaling	Frame Generation	Average FPS	1% Low FPS
Ultra	Off	On	Off	67	53
Ultra	Off	On	3x	147	79
Ultra / Custom	High	Unavailable with RT	3x	90	31
Basic	Off	On	Off	93	79
Basic / Custom	High	Unavailable with RT	3x	58	39

I also wanted to see how well Modern Warfare 4 scales when you lower the graphics settings, and more importantly, whether that comes with a noticeable hit to visual quality. So, I switched to the Basic preset, keeping DLSS enabled, Frame Generation off, and ray tracing disabled. The RTX 5070 averaged 93fps, with a 79fps 1% low.

That's a 26fps improvement over Ultra, with the 1% lows also jumping from 53fps to 79fps. GPU usage remained at 99%, with temperatures hovering around 72 degrees Celsius, while CPU usage dropped slightly to 24%.

What surprised me more, though, was how good the game still looked. Sure, there are differences in visual quality when you compare Basic to Ultra, but they weren't nearly as noticeable as I expected during regular gameplay. The environments still looked detailed, the explosions were just as impactful, and the overall presentation held up quite well. So, if you're playing on slightly older hardware or simply want higher frame rates without giving up too much visual fidelity, Basic is actually a pretty good place to start.

Modern Warfare 4 Ray Tracing Performance

Ray tracing is where Modern Warfare 4's performance becomes a little harder to recommend.

The game offers two ray-tracing settings: Low and High. Low enables ray-traced reflections, while High adds ray-traced global illumination on top. On paper, that's a nice way of scaling the visual effects depending on how powerful your GPU is.

But once I enabled High ray tracing with Ultra graphics and Frame Generation switched on, the experience changed quite dramatically. The game averaged 90fps, which doesn't sound particularly bad at first, but the 1% low dropped all the way to 31fps.

And those numbers don't quite explain how unpleasant it was to play.

I was seeing microstutters throughout gameplay, alongside the familiar visual artifacts that can sometimes appear with Frame Generation. The on-screen PCL reading also jumped from its usual 52ms to around 140ms, which is a considerable increase. You could feel that something was off almost immediately, regardless of what the average FPS counter was reporting.

I tried reducing ray tracing from High to Low, and while that made the experience slightly more playable, it didn't completely get rid of the stutters. At that point, I would much rather turn ray tracing off and enjoy a more consistent experience.

I also wanted to see whether lowering the graphics preset would help, so I switched to Basic, enabled High ray tracing, and kept 3x Frame Generation selected. Surprisingly, the average dropped to just 58fps, while the 1% low settled at 39fps.

GPU usage was again sitting at 99%, with temperatures around 72 degrees Celsius, while CPU usage was only 16%. The microstutters also made a comeback, making this another configuration I wouldn't recommend.

There is an important caveat here, though. Enabling ray tracing also disables DLSS upscaling, so these aren't like-for-like comparisons against the earlier DLSS-enabled runs. Part of the performance difference comes from the change in the rendering configuration itself, rather than ray tracing alone.

Still, from a player's perspective, the end result is what matters. Modern Warfare 4 already looks fantastic without ray tracing, and I didn't find the additional reflections and lighting improvements compelling enough to justify the stutters and extra latency I experienced. I'd much rather keep ray tracing disabled on the RTX 5070 until these issues are addressed.

Should You Buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4?

After spending time with Modern Warfare 4's campaign and testing different graphics configurations, I'd say the PC version leaves a largely positive impression, although there are a few things that could use some work.

My biggest complaint is ray tracing. The additional visual effects come with a considerable performance penalty. But, the thing is, Modern Warfare 4 still looks quite good without ray tracing.

Photo Credit: Activision/ Infinity Ward

As for the campaign itself, I've been enjoying it quite a bit so far. The story follows two parallel conflicts, with North Korea invading South Korea while Captain Price goes rogue on a personal mission of his own. What I like is that the campaign feels closer to the older Modern Warfare games, with intense firefights, big action sequences, and enough variety between missions to keep things interesting. The pacing has been pretty good so far, and while I haven't finished the story yet, I'm quite invested in seeing how everything comes together. Our full review of the game will be out this week, so stay tuned to Gizbot.

So, should you buy Modern Warfare 4? Based on my time with the campaign, I'd say yes. It's a visually impressive return for the series, and the PC version gives you plenty of options to adjust the experience around your hardware.