Activision has released the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for those who pre-order the game. It’s powered by IW engine 9, now it’s time to benchmark it and see how it performs on PC.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB DDR4 at 3800Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit. , GeForce 522.25 and Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 22.10.2 drivers.
Infinity Ward and Beenox have added a lot of graphical settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shaders, Tessellation, Shadows, Particles, Ambient Occlusion and more. And although there is no support for any Ray Tracing effects, the game supports NVIDIA DLSS, Intel XeSS, and AMD FSR 1.0. Not only that, there is also the option to compile shaders before starting the game, which completely eliminates all possible stuttering.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does not have any built-in benchmarking tools. That’s why we used the space below for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks. This area looked pretty challenging so it might give us an idea of how the rest of the game goes.
We simulated a dual-core, quad-core and six-core CPU to find out how the game scales across multiple CPU threads. Without Hyper-Threading, our simulated dual-core system took over 7 minutes to load the level (and when it did, there were HUGE stutters). Therefore, we can easily say that it is unplayable on that system. When we enabled Hyper-Threading, we witnessed an average of 70 fps in 1080p/Extreme Settings. However, there was still a lot of stuttering which resulted in a very choppy experience.
What is interesting here are the results with eight cores and simulated six cores. This is the first time we’ve seen such performance differences between the HT and non-HT versions of these systems. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is one of the few games that can take advantage of more than 8 CPU cores/threads. And thanks to these amazing multi-threading capabilities, an older CPU like the i9 9900K can boost frame rates to well over 180fps.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does not require a high-end GPU to play games at 1080p/Extreme. All in all, our AMD Radeon Vega 64 managed to deliver a smooth gaming experience. However, we should point out that this game works best on AMD’s hardware. This is the first time we’ve seen such an enormous performance difference between the RTX3080 and the RX 6900XT. We’re talking more than 40fps at 1080p/Extreme.
At 1440p/Extreme, our top four GPUs had no trouble running the game at more than 60fps. Again, pay attention to the performance of AMD GPUs. Vega 64 is 60% faster than GTX980Ti. As for 4K/Extreme, the RTX3080, RX 6900XT and RTX4090 were able to offer a stable 60fps experience.
Graphically, COD: MW2 looks great. The environments look great and the game’s lighting system is quite advanced. The character models are also among the best we’ve seen. As mentioned earlier, the game does not include any Ray Tracing effects. However, it looks incredible. Add to that the fact that it can run on a wide variety of PC configurations, and you’ve got yourself a truly optimized hood. The only gripe here is the limited view range. Even at Extreme settings, distant objects have noticeable popups. Given how optimized this game is, it would make sense to add a more intense/heavy LOD setting to address these issues.
All in all, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 runs incredibly well on PC. In fact, this is one of the most optimized PC games we’ve seen in 2022. Yes, the game requires a phone number and internet connection. And yes, it does not have Ray Tracing. However, it runs silky smooth on a wide range of PC configurations. Not only that, it looks great and can take advantage of more than eight CPU cores/threads.
Enjoy!
John Papadopoulos
John is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of DSOGaming. He’s a fan of PC gaming and is extremely supportive of modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While it’s a die-hard PC player, its game roots can be found on consoles. John loved and still loves 16-bit consoles and considers the SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won it over the consoles. This is mainly because of 3DFX and its iconic custom 3D accelerator graphics card Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher grade thesis on “The Evolution of PC graphics cards”.
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