Today, we are going to take a deep look at what are the Best Graphic settings for Call of Duty: Cold War, by using the campaign missions to benchmark at 4K (3840 x 2160).
Cold War is the newest installment to the Call of Duty franchise, following 2019’s Modern Warfare, as both tie into the very popular Warzone. I have already created an in depth Best Graphic Settings guide for Warzone, so check that out as well.
While both these games are now in the same eco-system, sharing Warzone as a common link, they are still separate entities in terms of campaign missions and multiplayer, as each runs on a different game engine.
Table of Contents
Best Graphics for Call of Duty: Cold War
Infinity Ward used their propriety engine to create Modern Warfare and Warzone, while Treyarch used their engine to create Cold War.
Warzone will continue to run on Infinity Ward’s engine, which is why you need to do separate graphic optimizations for both it and Cold War.
With the release of the PlayStation 5 ($449.99) and Microsoft XBox Series X ($449.00)., console gamers are now more in control of their graphic settings than ever before. Due to their increased hardware capabilities, the new consoles are giving gamers custom option choices very similar to PC’s, which is great to see, as this guide will now be able to help both PC and console gamers.
With that said, lets take a look at the best graphics settings for Call of Duty: Cold War.
Call of Duty: Cold War Benchmark PC Setup
The following Call of Duty: Cold War Benchmarks were done at 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution, using the following PC system specs:
- Graphics Card :
RTX 2070 Super (DISCONTINUED)- Check out Nvidia RTX 3070 or AMD RX 6800
- CPU :
AMD Ryzen 7 3700x (DISCONTINUED)- Check out Ryzen 5 5600X ($159.19)
- RAM: Corsair CMW32GX4M2C3200C16 Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB ($114.00)
- Motherboard : Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi ($399.99)
- Storage Drive : Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 ($150.00)
- Recording Drive : Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe ($157.99)
- System Drive : Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB SATA ($139.00)
- Power Supply : EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3 ($285.00)
- Monitor :
Samsung 49″ RU7300 – 4K Smart TV (DISCONTINUED)
PC Setup Extras
- Keyboard : Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard (Price not available)
- Keyboard Rubber O-Rings : Rosewill Mechanical Keyboard Rubber O-Rings (Price not available)
- Mouse : Corsair M65 Elite – FPS Gaming Mouse ($42.85)
- Gaming Controller : Microsoft Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 ($150.99)
- PC Case : Phanteks Eclipse P600S (Price not available)
- PC Case Fans : Corsair LL120 RGB, 120mm RGB LED Fan – Triple Pack ($69.99)
- PC Case RGB LED Strips : Speclux Computer Magnetic Addressable RGB LED Strip Kit ($16.99)
- PC Case RGB Controller : Corsair iCUE Commander PRO ($82.90)
- CPU Cooler : Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition CPU Air Cooler ($99.99)
Microphone : Rode NT1-A Anniversary Condenser Microphone (DEPRECIATED)- Microphone Stand : RODE PSA 1 Swivel Mount Studio Microphone Boom Arm ($98.50)
- Audio Interface Device : Steinberg UR22C 2×2 USB 3.0 Audio Interface ($194.99)
- Headphones : Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 80 Limited Edition Black ($200.00)
- NVMe Expansion : ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card V2 – 4x NVMe M.2 ($47.99)
- HDMI Switch : KVM 4K60p HDMI USB 4 Way Switch (Price not available)
- Stream Deck : Elgato 15 Key Stream Deck (No products found.)
- Monitor RGB LED Light Strips : GIDERWEL RGBW LED Strip Light,16.4ft SMD5050 ($15.99)
- RGB LED Light Strip Controller : GIDERWEL Home Smart Zigbee RGBCCT (Philips Hue Compatible) ($21.99)
- SATA Cables : 10 Pack 16 Inch SATA III 6.0 Gbps Cable (Price not available)
- Figurine (Storm Trooper) : Revoltech Star Wars Stormtrooper 6.7″ Action Figure ($181.64)
- Figurine (Darth Vader) : Revoltech Star Wars Darth Vader 6.7″ Action Figure ($64.57)
Call of Duty: Cold War Benchmarks - Individual Settings
As with all my best graphic settings benchmark articles, I usually set all graphic settings to their MAX/ULTRA value, then set each individual setting to its LOWEST/OFF value, one at a time, running the benchmark with each change.
However, I had to do it the opposite way around in this COD Cold War benchmark test.
Reason being is that the 8GB of vRAM on the RTX 2070 Super, simply wasn’t enough to push everything to its maximum, causing the game to crash with an Error Code: 3107840166. The game would crash on load of the mission or after a few minutes.
The main vRAM hogs were Texture Quality and Order Independent Transparency.
If i set one of these lower in order to be just under the 8GB threshold, (even if its just 100MB under), the game would be stable, albeit running at 16fps.
I guess 8GB just isn’t good enough going forward with 4K gaming anymore.
Regardless this isn’t a problem for our benchmarks, as I simply ran them the opposite way around, setting everything to their lowest values (in order to create a base value), and then cranking each setting individually to its maximum quality setting.
This will allow us to then rank which graphic settings are most resource intensive and tone those down, in order to get the most visual detail, for optimal trade off in frame per second (fps) performance.
I chose to use the campaign mission “Brick in the Wall” as my testing platform, as there is unfortunately no built in benchmark. This intro sequence from the train to the rooftop worked great, as it was very linear and thus repeatable (giving accurate results), while also throwing a ton of interior and exterior night time lighting, gunfire and epic view distances into the scene.
Basically everything that brings your GPU to its knees.
Here are the results.
After setting every setting to its lowest/off value, I was able to achieve 70fps at 4K, which becomes our baseline value, which we will compare the rest of the tests to. Lowers values than 70fps tells us that setting is a performance hit and higher values than 70fps, mean that setting offers a performance increase.
Right off the bat, we can see that individually, the majority of the Call of Duty: Cold War’s graphic settings offer very little difference in performance between the very highest and very lowest/off setting, except for the regular culprits, being Raytraced Shadows and Texture Quality, and a few others
If we put this into a sorted table from highest to lowest performance gains, we can more clearly see the results easier.
Raytraced Local Shadows gave the biggest performance hit of 25fps (36%) after I was only able to reach 45fps with it on, down from our baseline of 70fps.
A very close second place goes to Raytraced Ambient Occlusion, which resulted in a 23fps (33%) performance loss, with its 47fps.
Raytraced Sun Shadows didn’t have much of an effect here, as this was a night time scene, but during the day time, I am sure it will show similar results.
Then, such for interest sake, I ran a separate test with all 3 Raytracing options on their highest value to see what the overall Raytracing performance hit would be. This results in a 31fps (44%) loss in performance as it was only able to output 31fps, down from 70fps.
In 4th place is Texture Quality which caused an 18fps (26%) loss in performance, with its 52fps test results.
The performance hits now become much smaller as Ambient Occlusion caused a 7fps (10%) loss in performance, followed by Volumetric Lighting with a 4fps (6%) loss in performance, followed closely by Order Independent Transparency with a 3fps (4%) loss in performance.
From here, Shadow Quality and Motion Blur both caused a 2fps (3%) loss in performance, while everything else made no difference.
Best Nvidia Graphics for Cold War
Nvidia RTX 3070 Graphics Cards on Amazon
- EVGA RTX 3070 XC3 Black 8GB ($739.99)
- MSI Gaming RTX 3070 8GB ($689.90)
- Zotac Twin Edge RTX 3070 8GB ($1,197.73)
- Zotac Twin Edge OC RTX 3070 8GB ($499.00)
- PNY Revel RTX 3070 8GB ($599.00)
- PNY Uprising RTX 3070 8GB (Price not available)
Nvidia RTX 3080 Graphics Cards on Amazon
- ASUS TUF Gaming 10GB ($899.90)
- EVGA RTX 3080 Black 10GB ($799.99)
- EVGA RTX 3080 XC3 Ultra 10GB ($763.13)
- EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 Gaming 10GB ($1,070.00)
- EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra 10GB ($799.99)
- MSI Gaming RTX 3080 10GB ($879.99)
- Zotac Trinity RTX 3080 10GB (Price not available)
- Zotac Trinity OC RTX 3080 10GB ($1,099.01)
- PNY XLR8 RTX 3080 10GB ($435.70)
- Gigabyte Gaming OC RTX 3070 8GB ($832.13)
- Gigabyte Eagle OC RTX 3070 8GB ($499.99)
Best AMD Graphics for Cold War
Coming Soon
Call of Duty: Cold War DLSS Benchmarks
You might have noticed, that while Raytraced Shadows beat our frame into the ground, DLSS did the exact opposite, pumping our frames all the way up to 133fps, on DLSS Ultra Performance setting, netting us a massive 63fps (90%) performance gains.
DLSS Performance resulted in a 45fps (64) gain, DLSS Balanced a 35fps (50%) gain and even DLSS Quality, netted us a 25fps (36%) gain in performance.
I would strongly recommend using either DLSS Performance or DLSS Balanced for 4K gaming, as DLSS Ultra Performance gives too many artifacts.
I am delighted to see that Treyarch made use of DLSS in Cold War, as this was a much lacking feature in Modern Warfare and am still highly confused as to why it has not come to Warzone yet. Come on Infinity Ward, give us DLSS.
If you haven’t visited my list of the Best DLSS games yet, makes sure to do so, as you will quickly see just how amazing this technology is.
DLSS IMAGE QUALITY
DLSS does however come at a trade-off in quality compared to using brute force SMAA T2X Filmic (Ultra).
Have a look at the images below. I have highlighted areas in which you can clearly notice quality difference between SMAA T2X (DLSS OFF) and the rest of the different ‘DLSS ON’ settings, being the Neons Signs, Fences and most notably the volumetric spotlights.
The image quality of DLSS Ultra Performance is very poor quality, and would definitely not recommend using it, as it causes major checkerboard artifacts in this area. It causes a lot of the fine lines in areas such as the billboards and fences to be lost and also softens up the entire image in general.
The game does however state that this is intended for 8K gameplay as its really pushing the DLSS tech to it maximum capabilities. I certainly wouldn’t play it at 8K with such low quality though, considering how poor it looks at 4K already.
This is just the reality at our current times, as today’s hardware simply cannot push 8K out natively in game such as COD Cold War, with all its high fidelity graphics. As hardware advances, this will naturally be less of an issue.
Anything from DLSS Performance and up offers far better image quality, drastically reducing the checkerboard artifacts. While they can still be seen with DLSS Quality, its only ever so slightly. Its just the nature of the algorithm, as it upscale lower resolutions. This will get better in time as the AI evolves, but for now this is the best you are going to get unless you are happy to take the FPS performance hit and stick to native SMAA TX2.
My recommended DLSS setting is Balanced, but Performance is also very good trade-off between in game quality vs performance.
Note that this light beam is an extreme case of poor image quality, as the deep learning is clearly having a hard time trying to figure out what this moving white area is.
The rest of the game its not even noticeable, especially considering how fast paced the gameplay is. You really have to stop and look closely as I did, in order to notice these kind of things, which you rarely will in reality.
Alright, with all the individual results in, let’s take this data and compile the best graphic settings for Call of Duty: Cold War.
How to get 4K 60fps in Call of Duty: Cold War
I am going to divide the best graphics setting for Cold War into two sections. One for those without Raytracing and DLSS (i.e. those with a Nvidia Turing or Ampere graphics card) and then those with.
So, for everyone with a Nvidia Pascal or AMD graphics card, try out these settings in COD Cold War:
Best Graphics Settings Non RTX and DLSS
In summary, here are Best Graphic Settings for Call of Duty: Cold War, offering the best performance, while retaining the most graphical detail and beauty at 4K (3840 x 2160):
- Nvidia Low Latency: BOOSTED
- Texture Quality: HIGH
- Model Quality: HIGH
- 4K Interface Textures: ENABLED
- Special Effects Quality: HIGH
- Screen Space Reflections: LOW
- Object View Distance: HIGH
- Volumetric Lighting: MEDIUM
- Shadow Quality: HIGH
- Dynamic Shadows: ALL
- Special Effects Shadows: ENABLED
- Anti-Aliasing: ULTRA
- Ambient Occlusion: MEDIUM
- Weapon Shadows: ENABLED
- Motion Blur: DISABLED
- Subsurface Scattering: DISABLED
- Order Independent Transparency: MEDIUM
You are welcome to reduce/increase these further, depending on your graphics card, resolution etc, but these worked well for me, netting me a solid 60fps as 4K.
I always disable Motion Blur in these types of games as it becomes more of distraction than anything else. Plus you gain a slight performance bump for it, so win-win in my books.
Best Graphics Settings with RTX and DLSS
Then for those of you with a DLSS and Raytracing enabled Turing or Ampere graphics card, try out these graphic settings in Call of Duty: Cold War:
- Nvidia Low Latency: BOOSTED
- Texture Quality: HIGH
- Model Quality: HIGH
- 4K Interface Textures: ENABLED
- Special Effects Quality: HIGH
- Screen Space Reflections: LOW
- Object View Distance: HIGH
- Volumetric Lighting: MEDIUM
- Shadow Quality: HIGH
- Dynamic Shadows: ALL
- Special Effects Shadows: ENABLED
- Ray Tracing Sun Shadows: ULTRA
- Ray Tracing Local Shadows: ULTRA
- Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion: ULTRA
- DLSS: ENABLED (Performance or Balanced)
- Weapon Shadows: ENABLED
- Motion Blur: DISABLED
- Subsurface Scattering: DISABLED
- Order Independent Transparency: MEDIUM
Thanks to DLSS, I was able to put all Raytraced Shadow settings to their maximum, and still get better performance results than non-raytracing, with SMAA TX2 Anti Aliasing.
Note that, when enabling DLSS, the Ambient Occlusion setting is greyed out, as this now falls onto the Raytracing Ambient Occlusion setting instead.
Here again, you can lower or up the settings to suit your resolution target refresh rate and system hardware capabilities, as everyone is going to have different goals and needs here.
For me its 4K 60p, which this worked great for.
As mentioned in the start of this article, your lack of vRAM will be more of an issue when trying to max out the graphic settings, than the FPS performance in COD Cold War. If you are having issues with vRAM limitations, first lower your Texture Quality, followed by Order Independent Transparency.
Best Call of Duty: Cold War Graphic Settings Conclusion
Well guys, that’s it from me, and the Best graphics settings for Call of Duty: Cold War Best benchmark review.
If you are running out of hard drive space, check out this list of the best HDD & SSD storage devices for Call of Duty.
Best Hard Drives for COD Cold War
Western Digital Blue Hard Drives on Amazon
- WD Blue 1TB SATA HDD ($39.19)
- WD Blue 2TB SATA HDD ($85.98)
- WD Blue 4TB SATA HDD ($119.99)
- WD Blue 6TB SATA HDD ($126.43)
Western Digital Black Hard Drives on Amazon
- WD Black 1TB SATA HDD (No products found.)
- WD Black 2TB SATA HDD ($99.99)
- WD Black 4TB SATA HDD ($144.99)
- WD Black 6TB SATA HDD ($256.50)
- WD Black 8TB SATA HDD (Price not available)
Western Digital UltraStar SATA Hard Drives on Amazon
- WD 1TB Ultrastar DC HA200 SATA HDD ($45.00)
- WD 2TB Ultrastar DC HA200 SATA HDD ($51.27)
- WD 4TB Ultrastar DC HC310 SATA HDD ($120.99)
- WD 6TB Ultrastar DC HC310 SATA HDD ($100.00)
- WD 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 SATA HDD ($150.00)
- WD 10TB Ultrastar DC HC510 SATA HDD ($264.45)
Seagate IronWolf PRO SATA Hard Drives on Amazon
Best SSD for COD Cold War
Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
- Samsung 860 EVO 250GB ($39.99)
- Samsung 860 EVO 500GB ($108.00)
- Samsung 860 EVO 1TB ($139.00)
- Samsung 860 EVO 2TB ($274.99)
Western Digital Blue SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
- WD Blue 3D NAND 250GB ($24.95)
- WD Blue 3D NAND 500GB ($24.95)
- WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB ($132.00)
- WD Blue 3D NAND 2TB ($185.00)
ADATA SU635 SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
- ADATA SU635 240GB SATA SSD ($15.22)
- ADATA SU635 480GB SATA SSD ($39.99)
- ADATA SU635 1TB SATA SSD (Price not available)
- ADATA SU635 2TB SATA SSD (Price not available)
Western Digital Green SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
- WD Green 240GB SATA SSD ($32.82)
- WD Green 480GB SATA SSD ($45.95)
- WD Green 1TB SATA SSD ($99.99)
- WD Green 2TB SATA SSD ($185.99)
Crucial MX500 SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
Alternatively if you are looking at building a new gaming PC, make sure to check out my PC building and buying guides as well:
If you are in the market for a new Gaming Monitor, then check out these lists as well
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