If you’ve been playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Beta over the weekend, you’d have noticed the sheer amount of customization options present even in the beta of the game. The full release is expected to have even more settings related to accessibility, visuals, gameplay, and interface customization.
This guide will focus on providing the best PC settings for Modern Warfare 2, which will also be relevant for use in Warzone 2 when it comes out later in November. We will be giving you community-favored suggestions as well as our findings.
Best PC Settings for Modern Warfare 2 / Warzone 2
Since this is an in-depth PC settings guide, we will be covering the Display / Quality tabs in-game as well as other fixes that you can do externally to improve the game by a mile. These fixes will include setting tweaks and even a few config tweaks. So let’s get into the thick of things.
Display Settings
Most of the display settings should be accurate and self-explanatory on their own but a few of them need to be tweaked to ensure maximum performance.
Make sure your Display Mode is set to Fullscreen at all times and that the Dynamic Resolution option is turned OFF. Turning the latter on can result in pretty bad image quality and muddy textures.
Vsync
Vsync of all kinds has to be turned off because we’ll be using the in-game framerate limiter to limit our frames for a smoother experience. Vsync adds a lot of unwanted input delay, which is a deal breaker in fast-paced FPS games.
Custom Framerate Limit
If your GPU is overheating or you are facing a lot of FPS spikes, setting the custom framerate limit to whatever your monitor’s refresh rate is will fix the issue. Set your other custom framerate to 60 for the lobby and 30 when you are Out of Focus (alt-tabbed).
Quality Settings
Render Resolution and DLSS
Make sure that your render resolution is set to the (native) resolution of your monitor. This will ensure that you get the best picture quality at all times. DLSS can be turned on and used if you are playing the game on 1440p or even 4k and are suffering from FPS hits.
Setting DLSS to Quality should do the trick for most people, but you can tinker with it until you find the perfect balance between quality and performance.
Anti-Aliasing
Set this to SMAA T2X as the difference between this and the other setting is not much in terms of visual fidelity, but you will gain a few extra frames by setting it to our recommendation.
Details and Textures
Texture Resolution allows you to set how crisp your game looks in terms of weapon, skin, and environment detail. The higher you set this setting, the beefier your CPU/and VRAM need to be. It mainly tanks CPU utilization and the amount of VRAM being used by your game.
Shader Quality and Tesselation
You should set your Shader Quality to Low and Enable Tesselation all the way if you want your game to look decent. In our opinion, turning tesselation OFF doesn’t provide a significant fps boost, but it does make your game look a lot worse, which is not worth it.
On-Demand Texture Streaming
If you have installed the game on a crappy hard drive and are facing issues with longer load times or texture pop-ins then this is the setting for you. You can enable On-Demand Texture Streaming and set its limit to 24GB.
This setting allows your game to use your internet to download some texture files on your hard drive (within the space you allow it to use) and lets you load faster into levels. If you’ve installed the game on a fast SSD or an NVME, consider turning this OFF entirely.
Shadow & Lighting
All of the settings under this section are purely aesthetic based, and pushing them to high, or ultra won’t give you any gameplay advantage. On the other hand, these settings are extremely GPU and CPU intensive. So, keep all of them to the lowest preset you are comfortable with.
Mess with it a little bit until you can find the lowest preset you can go with without the game looking horrendous for you.
Post Processing Effects
Another group of settings purely functions to increase the overall appeal of the game. The only difference is that turning some of these On, such as Depth of Field or Motion Blur, hinders your ability to spot players quickly, and that’s something most players aren’t willing to trade for aesthetics in a fast-paced FPS game like COD.
Config File Tweaks
Now that we are done with the in-game fixes, let’s close the game and have a look at a few improvements you can make by tweaking the config file a little bit.
- First, you need to navigate to
C:\Users\username\Documents\Call of Duty\playersBeta - Open the Options file via Notepad.
- Set the Highest Video Memory Scale to 0.9 or less.
- Click Save and Close the file.
Conclusion
These settings should allow you to get a pretty smooth and visually balanced experience as you play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 or Warzone 2 on PC. A lot of the settings we suggested require some level of testing on your end since every PC build is slightly different, and yours might behave differently than our rig. So, there is some room for improvement here.
