Activision has released the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for those that have pre-ordered the game. Powered by IW engine 9, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on PC.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of 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, the GeForce 522.25 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 22.10.2 drivers.
Infinity Ward and Beenox have added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shaders, Tessellation, Shadows, Particles, Ambient Occlusion and more. And while there is no support for any Ray Tracing effects, the game supports NVIDIA DLSS, Intel XeSS and AMD FSR 1.0. Not only that, but there is an option to compile shaders before starting the game, which completely eliminates all potential stutters.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. Therefore, for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks, we used the following area. This area appeared to be quite demanding, so it can give us an idea of how the rest of the game runs.
In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. Without Hyper-Threading, our simulated dual-core system took more than 7 minutes to load the level (and when it did, it had MAJOR stutters). Thus, we can safely say that it’s unplayable on that system. When we enabled Hyper-Threading, we witnessed an average of 70fps at 1080p/Extreme Settings. However, there were still numerous stutters which resulted in a very choppy experience.
What’s interesting here is the octa-core and simulated hexa-core results. This is the first time we see such performance differences between the HT and the 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 old CPU like the i9 9900K can push framerates higher than 180fps.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does not also require a high-end GPU for gaming at 1080p/Extreme. After all, our AMD Radeon Vega 64 was able to offer a smooth gaming experience. However, we should note that this game runs best on AMD’s hardware. This is the first time we see such a tremendous performance difference between the RTX3080 and the RX 6900XT. We’re talking about more than 40fps at 1080p/Extreme.
At 1440p/Extreme, our top four GPUs had no trouble at all running the game with more than 60fps. Again, pay attention to the performance of the AMD GPUs. The Vega 64 is 60% faster than the GTX980Ti. And as for 4K/Extreme, the RTX3080, RX 6900XT and RTX4090 were able to provide a constant 60fps experience.
Graphics-wise, COD: MW2 looks amazing. 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 said before, the game does not feature any Ray Tracing effects. However, it does look incredible. Add to this the fact that it can run on a wide range of PC configurations, and you got yourselves a really optimized title. My only gripe here is the limited view distance. Even on Extreme settings, there are noticeable pop-ins of distant objects. 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 does require a phone number and an Internet connection. And yes, it doesn’t have Ray Tracing. However, it runs silky smooth on a wide range of PC configurations. Not only that, but it looks amazing, and can take advantage of more than eight CPU cores/threads.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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The campaign sucks, it feels like the campaign of medal of honor 2010 or bf3, vastly inferior compared to mw2 and other great cod games, very repetitive and badly designed. It funny how these games were made to be cod knockoffs, in terms of campaigns i mean and cod itself became as dull and boring as those knockoffs from over a decade ago.
Happens to every franchise that lives this long, turns into a bad parody of itself.
I hated every COD from MW2 onward though, that’s when they started working directly with the military and undercutting their anti war message from the first few games that tried to depict the horrors of war, all the while while turning the franchise into a a generic blockbuster which is what MW2 and every game since has been.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ebf152fea62c24a7ec072922a54024a7befe5d9a6169c25559ef8ab7f723f8ed.png
I’m surprised that John hasn’t noticed these anomalies!
Guess the 8K resolution is doing him no favors…
That’s why we need moooooooooore Ray Tracing. More more more 😛 . Joking aside, these anomalies are rare (and I hadn’t even noticed that while playing the game. It’s WAY easier to see them in still images). The pop-in issues on the other hand… now that’s what really disappointed me here.
I love how people show off their 4k and 8k setups running games on DLSS and FSR. So silly, to have a high resolution without native adaptability, being given fake frames and jittery ailing and lower image quality in order to have higher fidelity… of lower quality… lmfao.
And yet, Black Ops 2, even with the flawed Tower Defense mini game, is the best CoD ever made.
Nah, best COD is still United Offensive by far.
Great campaign addon, top tier multiplayer with classes and vehicles on big maps.
One of the worst.
AMD Rewards Gamers !!
NVIDIA (NSHITIA) Punishs Their Slaves !!
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AMD = A Smarter Choice !!
The most likely reason for this is because they ported the DX12 renderer from the Xbox Series over to PC, which is obviously optimized for AMD’s GPUs.
Fun fact:
The same is true for the Vulkan renderer of Doom (2016), as presented by id Software during SIGGRAPH 2016 (see attached picture).
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d15966e8828119636bedcd69c85b71eed76f9d7a81f788d28f8cf423270aeee0.png
https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/pic/orig/media%2FFfvyiUWXoAAQ0UG.jpg
also is anyone suprised gotham Cucknights flopped?
Damn! I didn’t know who was behind GK abomination (I was never purchasing/gifting it anyway so, it didn’t matter). It’s very clear now!
We all knew it was going to suck, but they really messed up bad here. I mean, come on, you can’t run the game properly on PC if you don’t lock it to 30FPS??? What a joke! This has to be the worst optimized game in 2022. Warner Bros just greedy to push the game out and take people’s hard earned cash for a game that isn’t even properly optimized at launch.
Why you never reload ffs?
Am I the only one getting crap performance in multiplayer? A 3070 laptop (140w with a mux switch) is getting under 100 fps with dlss. I was pushing 170 fps+ with dlss in MW and BOCW. And that’s with lower settings, so the game actually looks worse than those older games…
Turn off DLSS, set AA to SMAA and increase graphics to medium in MW2, some features meant to save resources appear to be consuming more…
There is the benchmark playlist in the game. I got around 200 fps in BOCW and Warzone and get around 140 with same settings in MW2, 3080 ti i9-9900k, which is in line with the stats in this article. Hopefully a future update will bridge gap between Nvidia and AMD generational performance stats.