// PC GAMER — GAMING
I've tested every graphics setting in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4—tweak these four options for the best performance
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I'm not usually one for all these fancy graphics; give me more frames, at all costs. But when I booted up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, I have to admit, I was a little reluctant to sacrifice too much in the visual department. Because the game is, indeed, gorgeous despite being a little glitchy with texture pop-ins and flickering in DMZ mode. A more tailored approach was needed. So, I set about testing every single graphics setting in the game, one by one, to see which ones have the biggest impact, and I found there are four main settings to tweak.
First things first, though, if you just want to get up and going and you're using a mid-range PC, whack it on the Balanced preset, and you'll be fine. If you're using a high-end rig, then you should be fine setting it to the Ultra preset.
Note: All performance figures were calculated by doing the same 30-second run in-game, on Mission 4 of the campaign. I kept all movements and actions as similar as possible in each run I performed.
Comparing game performance at different graphical presets at 1440p, using an RX 9070 XT, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM.
As you can see from the chart above, apart from enabling upscaling, by far the biggest performance jump comes from dropping from Ultra to Balanced. There's nowhere near as big a difference between Balanced/Basic/Minimum and Ultra/Extreme.
If you're keen on tinkering a little more, however, your first port of call should be the following four settings:
These settings are all found under Graphics > Quality > Advanced Quality Settings. The shadow settings obviously affect how shadows look, while the detail and terrain quality settings affect how the ground and small objects look. Increasing terrain quality makes things like ground surface textures appear more, well, textured, and detail quality makes small objects appear more—you guessed it—detailed.
Here's the difference between (1) normal shadow quality and high shadow filtering quality on the left, and (2) low shadow quality and normal shadow filtering quality on the right:
On the left side, shadow quality is normal and shadow filtering quality is high. On the right, shadow quality is low and shadow filtering quality is normal.