Activision and Infinity Ward’s latest first-person shooter, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, is now available for PC, and we’ve put together the best settings for getting optimized performance on mid-end system specs and the Steam Deck.
Before we delve into the best settings for the PC version of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, make sure you’ve updated your GPU drivers and Windows to their latest respective versions. Additionally, disable or close any unnecessary background applications in order to reduce the CPU overhead as much as possible. The settings detailed ahead should provide a more optimized balance between graphics and frame rate compared to the presets available in-game.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Best Settings
The settings below are there to serve as a broad starting point for further optimization based on your specific hardware specs. As a result, you may need to further tweak some settings until you find a sweet spot based on your display’s refresh rate and the overall performance you seek.
Display
- Display Mode: Fullscreen Exclusive
- Screen Refresh Rate: As per the max refresh rate of your display
- Display Resolution: As per the max resolution of your display or preference
- V-Sync (Menus): Off on displays that support VRR/G-Sync, otherwise set to On to target your preferred refresh rate
- V-Sync (Gameplay): Off on displays that support VRR/G-Sync, otherwise set to On to target your preferred refresh rate
- Custom Frame Rate Limit: Custom
- Gameplay FPS Limit: As per the max refresh rate of your display or preference
Quality
- Ray Tracing: High (or Low if performance headroom is not available)
- Dynamic Resolution: Off
- Upscaling / Sharpening: NVIDIA DLSS on supported GPUs, AMD FSR otherwise
- Upscaling Preset: Performance
Advanced Quality Settings
- VRAM Scale Target: 80
- Texture Resolution: High
- Texture Filter Anisotropic: High
- Detail Quality: Low
- Particle Resolution: Low
- Bullet Impacts: On
- Persistent Effects: On
- Shader Quality: High
- Shading Quality: High
- On-Demand Texture Streaming: Optimized
- Local Texture Streaming Quality: Low
- In-Game Video Quality: High
- Shadow Quality: Normal
- Shadow Filtering Quality: Normal
- Screen Space Shadows: Low
- Occlusion and Screen Space Lighting: Low
- Screen Space Reflections: Normal
- Static Reflection Quality: High
- Terrain Quality: High
- Volumetric Quality: High
- Deferred Physics Quality: Off
- Water Grid Volumes Quality: Off
- Water Quality: Off
Post-Processing Effects
- World Motion Blur: Off
- Weapon Motion Blur: Off
- World Depth of Field: Cutscenes Only
- Weapon Depth of Field: Off
How Does Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Run On Steam Deck?
Display
- Display Mode: Fullscreen Exclusive
- Screen Refresh Rate: Auto
- Display Resolution: 1280 x 800
- V-Sync (Menus): Off
- V-Sync (Gameplay): Off
- Custom Frame Rate Limit: Unlimited
Quality
- Ray Tracing: Off
- Dynamic Resolution: Off
- Upscaling / Sharpening: AMD FSR otherwise
- Upscaling Preset: Performance
Advanced Quality Settings
- VRAM Scale Target: 80
- Texture Resolution: Very Low
- Texture Filter Anisotropic: Low
- Detail Quality: Low
- Particle Resolution: Very Low
- Bullet Impacts: Off
- Persistent Effects: Off
- Shader Quality: Low
- Shading Quality: Low
- On-Demand Texture Streaming: Optimized
- Local Texture Streaming Quality: Low
- In-Game Video Quality: High
- Shadow Quality: Very Low
- Shadow Filtering Quality: Low
- Screen Space Shadows: Off
- Occlusion and Screen Space Lighting: Off
- Screen Space Reflections: Off
- Static Reflection Quality: High
- Terrain Quality: Very Low
- Volumetric Quality: Low
- Deferred Physics Quality: Off
- Water Grid Volumes Quality: Off
- Water Quality: Off
Post-Processing Effects
- World Motion Blur: Off
- Weapon Motion Blur: Off
- World Depth of Field: Cutscenes Only
- Weapon Depth of Field: Off
As seen in the above video, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 tends to run above 40 fps for the most part on the Steam Deck using the lowest graphical settings, rarely dipping into the mid to high 30s. As such, we consider the game to be playable on Valve’s handheld device.
