Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Evolved FPS Optimization & Full Breakdown Comparison

This complete breakdown shows you all of the graphics options in the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 Open Beta. Everything was painstakingly tested and recorded both through multiplayer and campaign for the best results.

Some options have On, Cutscenes Only and Off – Using The latter 2 are the same when it comes to general gameplay, hence only 2 options are mentioned when there are 3 available.

Graphic Preset

Logically, Graphics Preset is going to be one of the largest non-upscaling boosts in performance, and of course, it is reflected here. Most of the performance boost comes when moving from Extreme down to Balanced, whereas the lower options don’t seem to have that much of an effect. I assume this is likely a shift from a heavy GPU limitations to possibly CPU limitations, and as this is just one powerful switch to rule them all - test each setting on your device!

Native Anti-Aliasing and Upscaling

There is no way to turn off upscaling completely. However, there are a few native or near-native upscaling experiences. DLAA is going to give you the best quality on Nvidia graphics cards, however, it does come with a performance cost. Suprisingly, it’s a little bit more performant when it comes to average FPS than XeSS. If you’re looking for better performance and near-native resolution, choose Fidelity FX CAS or Filmic SMAA T2X.

DLSS Upscaling

All of the upscaling techniques should have a similar performance curve, so I’ve only benchmarked DLSS. Your performance increases the more to the performance side in the settings you go. DLSS offers both transformer and CNN, so I’ve documented them both here. Transformer should give you a slightly better looking image ay a small FPS cost.

When playing at 2K or 4K, the lower quality options are OK to use. However, if you’re playing at 1080p, I wouldn’t go lower than quality.

Ray Tracing Reflections

Outside of uscaling and the graphics preset quality option; Ray Tracing Reflections has the largest performance impact. I wouldn’t recommend playing with it on at all on most GPUs unless you’re rocking the best the best.

The game lists this as: “a rendering technique that simulates realistic lighting and visual effects in games by tracing the path of light through a scene. It offers more accurate reflections compated to traditional rasterization methods.”

Shadow Filtering

Shadow filtering has a suprisingly large FPS impact when you’re playing with high. Anything below this results in much sharper shadows. I assume blurrier shadows would be more realistic in most situations, however in a game like COD - Outside of the campaign FPS is king.

Terrain Quality

Terrain quality has a surprisingly large impact on FPS when it’s set to very high. However, there is an incredibly small difference between each of these options in terms of how the terrain actually looks - Set this to High and forget about it.

Texture Resolution

Texture resolution is almost always a freebie if you have more VRAM available, always crank this option up for a much better looking game at almost no FPS cost. Here I think most of the gain with very low comes from fewer explosions and maybe things going on in the background, than in the previous scenes. It should be +- the same across all of the options assuming you have enough VRAM available.

World Motion Blur

World motion blur is disabled by default and I’d highly recommend you leave it disabled no matter what.

Shadow Quality

You would expect shadow quality to affect the blurriness of shadows, and it does. Lowering this option should increase your FPS quite dramatically, and it is proven true here yet again. As this is a twitch shooter, you want the best experience with the highest FPS, so crank this all the way down to Low or Very Low and forget about it.

Shader Quality

Shader quality is incredibly difficult to tell the difference in terms of looks and performance with. All these tests were done with this specific cutscene, so there was no user input at the time. There is a small performance boost in terms of 1% and 0.1% lows when lowering it from High to Medium. In terms of average FPS would assume it’s just run-to-run variance and leaving this option at Medium should be the best.

The game states: “Select the quality of the lighting treatment applied on some surfaces. This has a slight impact on the colorization of these surfaces.”

World Depth of Field

I would assume world depth of field is currently broken as there is no difference between these options.

Occlusion and Screen Space Lighting

This is an involved setting. The game states: “Select the level at which the Ambient Lighting interacts with different surfaces creating perception of depth using GTAO, MDAO and Global Illumination”.

Low: Basic occlusion lighting with the GTAO technique. Medium: Elevated occlusino lighting using GTAO with the addition of Bent Normals. High: Better lighting quality & detail with MDAO technique. Ultra: Best lighting quality possible with the Global illumination technique

A lot of talk for little difference in terms of visuals. Off is not documented in the prompt, but is an option you can choose. My Lows for High during testing seem a little off, but overall there shouldn’t be too much performance difference between these from what I can see… Choose Medium or High and leave it there.

Detail Quality

“Select the quality of objects and small ground elements such as ground foliage, rocks, glass and various decals. Small to no impact visually and FPS-wise, you can lower this for slightly better FPS.

Static Reflection Quality

This required a game restart to change, and visuals-wise I don’t see much of a difference for a noticable performance boost. Lower this and forget about it.

Particle Resolution

Hard to get to the same spot perfectly being blown in this campaign section - however this option doesn’t seem to have much effect in terms of visuals and performance… Something I did notice is the pixelated mosaic effect appearing from some, I assume, heat sources/waves stays the same through all of these options. Possible more particles with this higher, small performance boost from the lower end.

Water Quality

There isn’t a great place to test this, so I picked the largest body of water to do so. The options do specifically mention “light on the ocean floor”, all we have are lights in a pool. Still, performance noticably increased turning this off, with minimal quality impact. We’ll have to wait for larger bodies of water or the sea to see the real difference in performance and looks.

Shading Quality

Again, an incredibly small difference. Performance change should be negligible.

Weapon Depth of Field

This option blurs or unblurs your weapon. It doesn’t really make an impact FPS, however gameplay-wise I find this option turned off makes ADS a little easier.

Screen Space Reflect

Screen space reflections are quite plentiful, and well optimized being such old tech. Each step you go down removes a few small reflections for a small FPS boost. I wouldn’t turn it off entirely, but if you need every last FPS sure. Otherwise, if it’s on just leave it on High, there’s not much difference between them.

Deferred Physics Quality

The “physics quality of water and ground deformation”. I didn’t see much difference in terms of ground deformation when shooting it from a vehicle, nor much difference in the bodies of water we can see. There should be a performance boost setting this to Medium, but I’m not too sure why my lows were so low when benchmarking High - they should be a lot more even.

In-Game Video Quality

In-game video quality should affect the quality of screens in-game, however, I didn’t really see that much of a difference from the screens that we do see.

Weapon Motion Blur

Similar to Weapon, Death of Field doesn’t have an impact on gameplay.

Bullet Impacts

Removes bullet marks with little to no performance change.

Weather Grid Volumes Quality

“Select the quality level of the weather effects applied to dynamic objects”. Can’t really be tested. I assume this will mainly come into play in things like DMZ where there is supposed to be dynamic weather and more, for now in Multiplayer and the single campaign mission we can’t really see it in action. So here’s a fiery scene instead - It’s a good place I could test the options without changing position at all.

Screen Space Shadows

Affects more than just the “local surfaces such as the weapon and character” as stated.

Persistent Effects

Hard to tell the difference and requires a restart to take effect. Done in Campaign for maximum repeatability. Right after this screenshot a massive explosion occurs likely leading to major terrain deformation, as well as other explosions in the battle that ensues shortly. Huge drop in FPS so likely a lot of this behind the scenes too!

Texture Filter Aniso

Almost no impact performance and visuals-wise.