So Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 finally comes out on PC and the technical side of the game differs quite a bit from what we are used to. So if you are one of those gamers who wants high fidelity gaming with Ray Tracing on there is going to be a whole lot of limits that you are going to need to get over. Because when you enable the Ray Tracing features you will find the game dis-ables all the major up-scaling features that gamers tend to use which means that they can only use native rendering or expect large frame drops. So you can imagine for all the buyers out there who want great visuals as well as solid performance this is a big issue that removes most of your options when it comes to the normal optimization techniques.
PC release removes Ray Reconstruction and forces Variable Rate Shading
So this PC game was developed by Beenox. And we can tell from our tests that there is a clear AMD love. So what we did is we took out and ran some benchmarks for this game using AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor with 32GB DDR5 Ram 6000Mhz.
The GPU's we used for the testing was the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX and RX 9070XT. Along with the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. We were using Windows 10 64 bit with GeForce 621.01 and Radeon Adrenalin Edition 26.10.1 drivers to make sure there was a uniformity of results between both GPU categories.
Overall most GPU's were able to get a frame rate of over 60 FPS at 1080p and 1440p under Extreme Settings without Ray Tracing. Also we can see that in our test the top 5 GPU's in this test group had a consistent frame rate of 60FPS for Native 4K Under Extreme Settings. Now you will also find AMD GPU's tend to do better than their NVIDIA counter parts in this particular game.
Which is no surprise as previous Call of Duty releases show the same tendency. But not all is perfect here. Because you will get stutters during traversal due to data loading delays in certain areas of the Campaign.
Probably the biggest technical concern we have with this game though is around the Ray Tracing and Upscaling features. Because when you enable Ray Tracing you will find that Beenox has dis-abled DLSS and FSR. So that's a problem if you are NVIDIA or AMD and have those particular technologies.
Also when you have DLSS or FSR or XeSS or Ray Tracing on the game will force Variable Rate Shading on, which can effect the image quality. We also notice that NVIDIA Ray Reconstruction isn't in the PC version so that's another restriction on what you can do to improve visual fidelity for NVIDIA users. So this makes it less then ideal for those people who like to go big with graphical settings.
We've been keeping an eye on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4. If you want to read more about this you can check out some of our previous coverage about this game like this Activision Guide Reveals How To Access Call Of Duty. Well the PC version has finally been released but you should be aware of the major drawbacks in Ray Tracing and Upscaling capabilities.
Also you may find you get better performance if you are an AMD user but you still have those pesky stutters in traversal during some parts of the campaign. So Ray Reconstruction is not there and dis-abling of upscalers would seem to suggest that the developers have more of an emphasis on making it stable rather then optimizing for high-end hardware. So just be aware if you get this game that you're going to need to be careful with how you tweak your graphical settings to get a playable frame rate.
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