We’ve been testing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 on PC to find the best settings to achieve the highest fps in the game.
Modern Warfare 3 is a new bar for the franchise, at least in terms of visual quality. The highly scalable PC release can accommodate low-end systems, but if you’re looking to get the most mileage out of a midrange gaming PC, you’ll need the best settings for Modern Warfare 3.
I’ve been putting the game through its paces for about a week, testing the various options in the graphics menu, as well as its slew of upscaling options. Here’s everything you need to know about Modern Warfare 3‘s performance on PC.Best settings for Modern Warfare 3
Like previous Call of Duty releases, Modern Warfare 3 is absolutely stuffed with graphics settings. Even if you’re used to adjusting a graphics menu to get the best performance, Modern Warfare’s options are absolutely dizzying. After our testing, though, here are the best settings for Modern Warfare 3 that I settled on:
Render Resolution: 100
Dynamic Resolution: Off
Upscaling: DLSS on RTX, XeSS otherwise
VRAM Scale Target: 80
Variable Rate Shading: Off with DLSS/XeSS, On otherwise
Texture Resolution: Normal
Texture Filter Anisotropic: Normal
Depth of Field: On
Detail Quality Level: Normal
Particle Resolution: Low
Bullet Impacts: On
Persistent Effects: Off
Shader Quality: Medium
On-Demand Texture Streaming: On
Local Texture Streaming Quality: Normal
Shadow Quality: Low
Screen Space Shadows: Low
Ambient Occlusion: Statis objects (GTAO)
Screen Space Reflections: Normal
Static Reflection Quality: Low
Tessellation: Near
Terrain Memory: Medium
Volumetric Quality: Low
Deferred Physics Quality: Low
Weather Grid Volumes: Normal
Water Quality: Wave Wetness
We’re making most of the cuts to shadows and reflections. That’s not because they provide the best overall performance improvement — that goes to texture resolution, and I’ll dig into why in the benchmarks below — but because they don’t degrade the image quality as much. Even with the highest texture preset, there are some rough edges in Modern Warfare 3, and turning down the texture quality lower than what I have here is a sacrifice to image quality that’s just too big.
For performance, my optimized settings ended up just slightly faster than the Balanced preset, all while pushing a solid number of the settings higher. The benchmarks below don’t include any form of upscaling, but Modern Warfare 3 supports just about everything: DLSS, FSR 2, FSR 1, NIS, XeSS, and even its own built-in dynamic resolution.
My recommended settings center around using DLSS for RTX GPUs and XeSS for everything else. As I’ll dig into later, XeSS has more stability than FSR 2, though FSR 2 is a bit sharper. The built-in dynamic resolution is best if the other upscaling tools won’t work with your GPU, but I don’t recommend it otherwise. For the vast majority of players, you’ll want to stick with DLSS or XeSS.Modern Warfare 3 system requirements
As expected from a Call of Duty release, Modern Warfare 3 is highly scalable. You’ll need a modern midrange rig to run the game at its recommended settings, but if you’re using an older system, you can still play the game without issues, much unlike the recent Alan Wake 2.
