Today, we are going to take a deep look at what the best graphic settings for Call of Duty Warzone are, by running multiple benchmarks in 4K, using 4 of the campaign mission’s intro in-game cinematics, followed by some gameplay benchmarks in Warzone.
As with all my best graphic setting articles, I will start by first setting a baseline benchmark figure, which will be done with all settings at the Best/Ultra/Extreme.
From here, each of the individual graphic options within Call of Duty Modern Warfare’s Video Settings menu, will be turned down to its lowest/off setting and benchmarked again and compared to the baseline, in order to determine how it influences performance.
This will allow us to then rank which graphic settings are most resource intensive and tone those down slightly, in order to get the most visual detail, for optimal trade off in frame per second (fps) performance.
Alright lads, enough fk’in about, let’s begin.
COD Warzone Benchmark PC Setup
All Call of Duty Modern Warfare & Warzone 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 ($144.00)
- RAM: Corsair CMW32GX4M2C3200C16 Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB ($111.00)
- Motherboard : Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi ($118.77)
- Storage Drive : Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 ($93.62)
- Recording Drive : Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe ($163.32)
- System Drive : Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB SATA ($149.99)
- Power Supply : EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3 ($250.00)
- Monitor :
Samsung 49″ RU7300 – 4K Smart TV (DISCONTINUED)
PC Setup Extras
- Keyboard : Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard ($189.00)
- Keyboard Rubber O-Rings : Rosewill Mechanical Keyboard Rubber O-Rings (Price not available)
- Mouse : Corsair M65 Elite – FPS Gaming Mouse ($43.95)
- Gaming Controller : Microsoft Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 ($160.99)
- 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 ($99.99)
- CPU Cooler : Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition CPU Air Cooler ($94.74)
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 (Price not available)
- 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 ($60.39)
Call of Duty Modern Warfare Benchmarks
As mentioned above, let’s first establish our baseline fps to compare all of the individual graphical settings to, which we will do with all settings at their best, as well as turning off V-Sync.
Unfortunately there isn’t an official built-in benchmark tool within Call of Duty Modern Warfare, but on the other hand, each single player campaign mission actually has an in-game intro camera animation, followed by a linear story, which act very well as benchmarks.
With 14 campaign missions in Call of Duty Modern Warfare, this essentially gives us 14 great benchmarks to choose from.
I definitely wasn’t doing benchmark all 14 missions, but instead chose missions which are a variety of different environments including, a night time mission (Fog of War), an interior mission (Embedded), a daytime mission (Hunting Party) and lastly, a mission with tons of explosions and particles flying around (Into the Furnace) which is the final mission of the COD Modern Warfare campaign.
If you haven’t played any of these missions yet, I highly recommend that you do, or watch my full Call of Duty Modern Warfare walkthrough on my Youtube channel.
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$56.49Call of Duty Fog of War Mission Benchmarks
Fog of War is the first mission in Call of Duty MW, where you meet Alex, (code name Echo 3-1) for the first time, as he rappels down from a helicopter with a squad of mercenaries into a beautifully light, night time jungle scene, perfect for pushing our graphics card’s benchmarks as hard as possible.
Right off the bat, we can see that the majority of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare’s graphic settings offer very little difference in performance between the very highest and very lowest/off setting, which I found peculiar, but ran the benchmarks several times and the results were the same.
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference |
Anti-Aliasing – OFF | 33 | 52 | 19fps (58%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA 1x | 33 | 51 | 18fps (55%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA T2x | 33 | 48 | 15fps (45%) Gained |
Raytraced Shadows | 33 | 45 | 12fps (36%) Gained |
Tessellation | 33 | 35 | 2fps (6%) Gained |
Texture Resolution | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Texture Filtering | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Particle Quality | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Cache Spot Shadows | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Cache Sun Shadows | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – OFF | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Dynamic | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
World Motion Blur | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Bullet Spray | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Shadow Map Resolution | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Particle Lighting | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Static | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Depth of Field | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Weapon Motion Blur | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
If we put the graphs into a table, sorted from the most resource intensive to the least, it comes as no surprise that Raytracing is right up there. This gave us a 12fps (36%) increase in performance, compared to having Raytraced shadows on.
When Raytracing is on in Call of Duty MW, it defaults and locks the Anti-Aliasing to “Filmic SMAA T2x”. Therefore. when you turn Raytracing off, it remains on Filmic SMAA T2x Anti-Aliasing setting unless you change it to one of the others. Thus, the 12fps (36%) increase in performance is with “Filmic SMAA T2x” and Raytracing OFF.
From here, I kept Raytracing off and changed the Anti-Aliasing to OFF, SMAA 1x and SMAA T2x to see the difference, which was far more substantial than any of the other Call of Duty graphic settings.
With Anti-Aliasing OFF, the increase in performance jumped from 12fps (36%) to 19fps (58%), while SMAA 1x jumped to 18fps (55%) and SMAA T2x jumped to 15fps (45%).
So as we can see Anti-Aliasing definitely has a big impact on your frames per second in Call of Duty Warzone, but do remember that this is combined with the fact that Raytracing is also off at the same time, as they come as a bundled package.
I have a separate Call of Duty Modern Warfare video focused on Raytracing benchmarks here
Let’s see if this trend continues in our next Call of Duty Modern Warfare benchmark.
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Call of Duty Embedded Mission Benchmarks
Embedded is the 3rd mission in COD Modern Warfare and our second benchmark, which is inside a cave, lit with only a single flare light source. This scene is great for benchmarks, as it means plenty of shadows and particles from the flare, while everything we see depends on this single light source.
Much like our first benchmark, the differences between the highest/best graphic settings and the lowest/off graphic settings is no more than a single frame, often actually exactly the same.
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference |
Anti-Aliasing – OFF | 33 | 55 | 22fps (67%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA 1x | 33 | 54 | 21fps (64%) Gained |
Raytraced Shadows | 33 | 52 | 19fps (58%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA T2x | 33 | 51 | 18fps (55%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – OFF | 33 | 35 | 2fps (6%) Gained |
Shadow Map Resolution | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Cache Spot Shadows | 33 | 34 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Texture Resolution | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Texture Filtering | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Particle Quality | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Bullet Spray | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Tessellation | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Cache Sun Shadows | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Particle Lighting | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Static | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Dynamic | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Depth of Field | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
World Motion Blur | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Weapon Motion Blur | 33 | 33 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Turning Raytracing OFF, we gain a 19fps (58%) increase in graphical performance. Just like our Fog of War benchmarks, we see a very similar order of the non-Raytracing results, with the various Anti-Aliasing settings.
The other difference is the slightly higher gains in performance with Anti-Aliasing OFF gaining 22fps (67%), SMAA 1x at 21fps (64%) gained and SMAA T2x once again falling just below at 18fps (55%).
Other than that, you are safe at pumping all other Call of Duty graphic settings to their maximum, as they seem to have zero impact on performance.
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Field of View
Like most recent First Person shooter games, there is a Field of View setting in COD Modern Warfare, allowing you to set the degree at which the Field of View Changes.
This relates directly to real world camera lenses, where Wide Angle lenses offer a larger (wide Field of View) and Zoom lenses offer a lower, (narrower Field of View).
In Call of Duty Modern Warfare, you are given a slider bar, allowing you to set the Horizontal Field of View anywhere from 60° to 120°. I chose the 4 settings as per their example image, including 60°. 80°. 100° and 120°.
For those interested, here are the real world Horizontal Field of Views, in terms of camera lenses on a 35mm Full Frame Camera:
-
- 10mm Lens = 120° Horizontal Field of View
- 15mm Lens = 100° Horizontal Field of View
- 22mm Lens = 80° Horizontal Field of View
- 28mm Lens = 60° Horizontal Field of View
By default Call of Duty is set to a 60° Field of View, but if you set your game to a wider view such as 120°, you can see enemies in a much wider peripheral view.
Great! So just crank it all the way up and never be caught off guard again right!? Well not really because it does come with some sacrifices.
Field of View - Perceived Distance
The first major downside is perceived distance. As with real world camera lenses, the wider the lens, the further away and smaller the subjects appear in the center of the frame.
While this isn’t really a problem for some great landscape photos, it is a big deal in a First Person Shooter game, as the enemy in your centre view and iron sight become tiny, so trying to get accurate headshots becomes very challenging.
There are however two extra options under the Field of View Settings called “Independent” and “Affected” to address this issue better.
These two settings change how your character zooms their gun sight, with “Affected” being true to the real world causing your enemies to be very small in the centre of the screen, while “Independent”, breaks the laws of physics for the sake of game playability.
“Independent” causes the difference of your gun and arms to be independent (as the name states) of the Field of View, pulling the entire centre of view, closer to you, and with it the enemies, making them larger for you to more accurately shoot. This does however cause the rest of the environment to be pulled towards you as well, which can still be very jarring, especially with a gun with no scopes (iron sight).
The Independent setting only works for scopes with less than 3.25x magnifications. Anything more than this won’t be affected by it, but you will still get a jarring effect every time that you look through your scope at 120°, compared to 60°.
Field of View - Edge Distortion
The second major issue with very wide views, is that all areas on the edges of a camera lens are pulled and stretched closer to frame. This will cause a fish eye warping effect at 120° (10mm lens) which could make you feel slightly nauseous and also makes environment elements such as buildings, tanks or cars, appear abnormally stretched at the edges of the screen.
Field of View Benchmarks
Ok, so we went a little bit off topic here, but thought that it was important to understand how Field of View works. Now let’s see if changing your Field of Views has any impact on your frame per second gaming performance by running a few benchmarks in the Hunting Party mission.
As you can see, there is really no change in performance between the Field of views, with the 1fps difference in the 120° benchmark falling within the margin of error.
So set you Field of View to whatever suits your play style best, it won’t impact your fps.
Best Field of View in Call of Duty Modern Warfare
So, which is the best Field of View to choose in Call of Duty Modern Warfare?
Well, as you can see from the above, it’s basically a give and take situation.
The wider you go, the less likely you are to be caught off guard by enemies on your side, but you have to deal with enemies being smaller in the centre of the screen. It also depends on your gun and if it has a scope or not. There is really no right or wrong setting here, you have to really play with the Field of Views using your favorite gun and see what you like.
In general, I like to play at about 80°, as it gives me a little bit more peripheral vision in Multiplayer and Warzone, than the default 60°, while still allowing me to easily get headshots with iron sight. It also doesn’t make me feel like my mind and body are being pulled through a time warp and back, every time that I right click.
Call of Duty Hunting Party Mission Benchmarks
Hunting Party is the 6th mission in Call of Duty Modern Warfare and our 3rd benchmark. This time we are outside in a sunrise scene, filled with plenty of buildings, animations and shadows.
Once again, we see such small differences in the highest and lowest graphical settings. The gains are slightly higher than the previous two benchmarks, with settings such as Ambient Occlusion – OFF and Texture Resolution LOW offering an extra 10% and 8% performance increase, respectfully.
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference |
Anti-Aliasing – OFF | 40 | 60 | 20fps (50%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA 1x | 40 | 58 | 18fps (45%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA T2x | 40 | 54 | 14fps (35%) Lost |
Raytraced Shadows | 40 | 51 | 11fps (28%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – OFF | 40 | 44 | 4fps (10%) Gained |
Texture Resolution | 40 | 43 | 3fps (8%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Dynamic | 40 | 43 | 3fps (8%) Gained |
Shadow Map Resolution | 40 | 42 | 2fps (5%) Gained |
Cache Sun Shadows | 40 | 42 | 2fps (5%) Gained |
Depth of Field | 40 | 42 | 2fps (5%) Gained |
Weapon Motion Blur | 40 | 42 | 2fps (5%) Gained |
Texture Filtering | 40 | 41 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
World Motion Blur | 40 | 41 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Particle Quality | 40 | 40 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Bullet Spray | 40 | 40 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Tessellation | 40 | 40 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Particle Lighting | 40 | 40 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Static | 40 | 40 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Cache Spot Shadows | 40 | 39 | -1fps (-3%) Lost |
The only that gave us worse performance was turning Cache Spot Shadows OFF, decreasing our graphical performance -1fps (-3%), so nothing major either.
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Call of Duty Into the Furnace Mission Benchmarks
Into the Furnace is the last mission in COD MW, and only fitting to be our last benchmark scene as well. This mission is filled to the brim with action, including everything from tanks, missiles, helicopters to bullets whizzing past your face, all packaged in with a ton of explosions. This scene puts all our graphic settings to the test.
The trend continues, with very little difference between the highest and lowest graphical settings. There are however some slight losses in performance when turning off the Post Processing Effects Such as Depth of Field and Motion Blur.
We again see that turning on both the Cached Spot and Sun Shadows is ever so slightly beneficial, based on the fact that you have a graphics card with enough memory to cache them. The 8GB of VRAM in my Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Founders ($749.99) had no problem with it.
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference |
Anti-Aliasing – OFF | 42 | 52 | 10fps (24%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA 1x | 42 | 49 | 7fps (17%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing – SMAA T2x | 42 | 46 | 4fps (10%) Gained |
Raytraced Shadows | 42 | 45 | 3fps (7%) Gained |
Texture Resolution | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Texture Filtering | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Particle Quality | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Bullet Spray | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Tessellation | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Shadow Map Resolution | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Particle Lighting | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – OFF | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Dynamic | 42 | 42 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion – Static | 42 | 41 | -1fps (-2%) Lost |
Depth of Field | 42 | 41 | -1fps (-2%) Lost |
Weapon Motion Blur | 42 | 41 | -1fps (-2%) Lost |
Cache Spot Shadows | 42 | 40 | -2fps (-5%) Lost |
Cache Sun Shadows | 42 | 40 | -2fps (-5%) Lost |
World Motion Blur | 42 | 40 | -2fps (-5%) Lost |
In terms of the order, of the most frames per second gains, its identical to both the Fog of War and Hunting Party benchmarks, albeit lower gains than before with Raytraced Shadows OFF (Filmic SMAA T2x) gaining us 3fps (7%), Anti-Aliasing – OFF outputting a 10fps (24%) improvement, SMAA 1x outputting a 7fps (17%) improvement and SMAA T2x outputting a 4fps (10%) improvement.
On the opposite end of the scale, turning off the Post Processing Effects actually impacted performance, whereas in the 3D rendering world, (such as when creating CGI movies) it actually slows things down when you add motion blur and depth of field, but it seems the opposite in games.
In terms of caching, by disabling both Cache Spot Shadows and Sun Shadows resulted in a -2fps (-5%) loss in performance, while turning off the Post Processing Effects including Depth of Field and World Motion Blur resulted in a -1fps (-1%) loss in performance, excluding World Motion Blur which was a -2fps (-5%) loss.
My only logical opinion to this result, is that in a real time game such as Call of Duty Modern Warfare, these effects actually cover up/smudge a lot of the detail in the frame, lowering the need for your GPU to output crisp edges and thus slightly increasing performance.
They do however look great in the campaign missions, bringing a very cinematic look to them, as well as giving a slight boost in performance, but I generally disable them during Multiplayer and Warzone, as it’s far more important to have as much detail on screen as possible.
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Best Call of Duty Warzone Graphic Setting Benchmarks
Alrighty folks, now that we’ve run four solid benchmarks in controlled environments, let’s go into the Warzone and run some benchmarks there to see if these graphic setting benchmark results remain constant.
I chose to play Plunder for these benchmarks, choosing an area in the rural outskirts to be left in peace, while I do some repeat loops of an exterior and interior run-through. This gave me a solid average of both indoor as well out outdoor lighting and camera rendering distances, as you would while playing for real.
As with the previous campaign benchmarks, I first set up my baseline benchmark, cranking all of the graphic settings to their best, including Raytracing, which gave me 48fps at 4K (3840 x 2160) on my Nvidia RTX 2070 Super ($749.99).
How to Get 4K 60p in COD Warzone
Not too shabby actually, but I want to hit that 60fps mark to get the most out of my Samsung 49″ RU7300 which has a 60Hz refresh rate.
So let’s see how we can use the above campaign benchmark chart results to get there.
The first and most obvious, was to turn Raytracing off and leave it to its default Filmic SMAA T2x Anti-Aliasing setting. Oddly enough this has zero impact on my results and also benchmarked at 48fps.
How could this be?
Well I then checked to see if Raytracing Shadows are even enabled in COD Warzone and they are actually NOT.
I then went to find some shadows of trees on the ground to test this theory. I took some screenshots, with the first being Raytracing Shadows ON, and Raytracing Shadows OFF.
As you can see there is zero difference between having Raytracing ON and OFF. If you take a look at my COD Modern Warfare Raytracing Benchmarks Video, you will see that in the campaign mission, you can easily tell the difference between Raytracing ON and OFF, but here it simply does not exist.
In fact, if you look at the comparison below, you can see that Shadow Map Resolution LOW, actually looks like Raytraced Shadows.
It seems like Infinity Ward have silently removed Raytracing from Warzone altogether. Most likely done for sheer performance benefits, but it wasn’t something I knew, before doing these benchmarks.
Ok, so with that out of the way, we need to still hit that golden 60fps mark and according to our previous results, Anti-Aliasing is the next big culprit for hogging performance resources.
I thus turned Anti-Aliasing OFF and gained a solid 10fps, now reaching 58fps, just 2 frame shy of my 60fps target. But without any Anti-Aliasing the game’s edges look like hot, glimmering poo, so we need to at least have some form of Anti-Aliasing.
I then set the Anti-Aliasing to SMAA 1x, giving me 55fps, only losing 3fps, which is consistent to our campaign benchmark results as well.
Alright, so only 5 frames to 60fps, so let’s change the third resource hog culprit, Ambient Occlusion.
With Raytracing OFF, Anti-Aliasing at SMAA 1x and Ambient Occlusion turned off, I am happy to report that I was able to achieve a glorious 62fps in Call of Duty Warzone!
Mission Accomplished!
But as this is specific to my Nvidia RTX 2070 Super ($749.99), you won’t get the same fps if you are on a lower tier card and will need to sacrifice more settings to get there.
Anything below the RTX 2070 Super (ie the RTX 2060/Super) is really meant to hit 60fps at 4K, although not unachievable, if you are willing to sacrifice more graphical details for it.
If you do own a 2060/Super or anything lower than this, you will need to look at dropping Texture Resolution, Texture Filtering, Tessellation, Shadow Map Resolution and Screen Space Reflections, in order to squeeze out a few more frames.
These should be your last resort, as they start to really degrade your overall visual quality, compared to Anti-Aliasing and Ambient Occlusion, which you don’t really notice.
Best Nvidia Graphics for Warzone
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Best AMD Graphics for Warzone
Coming Soon
Texture Resolution
The next best option to adjust in your COD Warzone settings, is Texture Resolution. Setting this from HIGH to VERY LOW resulted in 67fps, gaining me another 5 frames over my previous 62fps, but the graphics look like absolute trash at this point, so those 5 frames certainly aren’t worth it.
Texture Resolution LOW yielded 66fps, while NORMAL gave me 65fps.
I would definitely go with NORMAL here, as it’s just one below HIGH, but gives you 3 extra frames, while retaining a good amount of detail.
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Texture Filtering Anisotropic
Anisotropic Texture Filtering is the method of enhancing the image quality of textures on flat geometry surfaces that are at oblique viewing angles in respect to the camera, especially textures such as a cobblestone road. The further in the distance the road goes, the more obvious the effect will become.
After setting Texture Filtering to LOW from HIGH in Call of Duty Warzone, I was able benchmark 65fps, gaining me 3 more frames over our previous 62fps, while NORMAL gave 63fps.
Anisotropic Texture Filtering is quite hard to spot and had to really look for a while to find a good example, until I finally stumbled upon the canal area. Here you can see an example of it on the sandstone block walls.
Tessellation
Tessellation is the method of increasing the amount of geometry (polygons) on a 3D mesh, which is also known as Subdivision, allowing for more detailed graphics.
Setting Tessellation to LOW from HIGH in COD Warzone, resulted in 64fps, only gained me 2 more frames over my 62fps.
I then did a benchmark with both Texture Filtering and Tessellation on LOW, and was surprised to see that they dont compound their results, as it again gave me 64fps and not 67fps which i was expecting (62fps + 3fps + 2 fps).
Unfortunately, I really couldn’t see a difference in geometry, no matter where I looked. Rocks, roads, walls, all look exactly the same with these two settings on HIGH and LOW.
I tried looking in the campaign missions as well, and also couldn’t find where Tessellation comes into play unfortunately.
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Shadow Map Resolution
Plain and simple, the higher the Shadow Map Resolution, the more crisp the shadows become.
Changing Shadow Map Resolution in COD Warzone from EXTRA HIGH to LOW, resulted in 67fps, again gaining me 5 frames over my 62fps.
Shadow Map Resolution NORMAL yielded 66fps, while HIGH gave me 65fps.
Much like Texture Resolution, I would choose HIGH here as its only one below EXTRA HIGH in terms of quality, but you gain an extra 3 frames.
Although strangely enough, in Call of Duty Modern Warfare, setting Shadow Map resolution to low, actually gives very real looking, soft raytracing-like shadows
Screen Space Reflections
Your final option is the turn off Screen Space Reflections (SSR) in COD Warzone. I ran the benchmark again with Screen Space Reflections set to OFF, LOW, NORMAL and HIGH, but saw no difference in the results, as all delivered the same 62fps.
This is most likely because this will only give you a boost when there are reflections on screen, such as water ponds, which in Warzone there aren’t too many of, but when there are, you will get a slight boost, although again sacrificing a low of visual detail.
Note that Call of Duty Modern Warfare DOES NOT use Raytracing Reflections. It ONLY uses Raytracing Shadows.
Other games like Wolfenstein Youngblood and Control use Raytrace Reflections. Check out my list of the Best Raytracing Games to find more title with Raytracing and to see if they use Shadows, Reflections or both.
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All settings on LOW
Just to be sure, I then turned off Texture Resolution, Texture Filtering, Tessellation, Shadow Map Resolution and Screen Space Reflections, as well as Ambient Occlusion, Raytracing and Anti-Aliasing set to SMAA 1x.
This only resulted in 69fps, which certainly isn’t worth it, and very odd that the gains in during each one off individually don’t compound when all are set to OFF/LOW at the same time. If you add up the above gains form each individual setting it comes to 18fps, but in reality you only gain 7fps, so I would really recommend choosing one or two at most to tune down.
With all the above considered, the most realistic choice is to lower your resolution unfortunately, otherwise upgrading your graphics card.
Anti-Aliasing
Alternatively you can use your spare frames to enable a higher quality Anti-Aliasing.
Here again I saw my frames drop by 7fps from 62fps to 55fps, when turning on Anti-Aliasing SMAA T2x from SMAA 1x
When I turned on both “Ambient Occlusion and SMAA T2x, I hit 50fps, giving me an overall drop of 12fps from 62fps. So if you are capping out around 72fps with your graphics card at 4K, then you can enable both of these again to still hit 60fps in Warzone.
Here is Call of Duty Warzone Anti-Aliasing Filmic SMAA T2x vs SMAA T2x. You can see that both give soft shadows, although Flimic offers cleaner (less noisy) shadows.
Here is Call of Duty Warzone Anti-Aliasing SMAA 1x vs Filmic SMAA T2x. You can see how SMAA 1x only has hard edge shadows, while SMAA T2x has softer shadows.
Here is Call of Duty Warzone Anti-Aliasing SMAA 1x vs Anti-Aliasing OFF. SMAA1x as the best performance vs quality setting for Anti-aliasing.
Lastly, here is Call of Duty Warzone Anti-Aliasing Filmic SMAA T2x vs Anti-Aliasing OFF. You can clearly see the difference in the quality on the very thin lines, as well as in the shadows of the building’s balcony.
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Ambient Occlusion
If you have a RTX 2080 Ti or better then you can gain back some Ambient Occlusion visual goodness and still hit 60fps. I saw my frames drop by 8fps from 62fps to 54fps, when turning on Ambient Occlusion. I would just set it “Ambient Occlusion – BOTH” as Static and Dynamic alone, give exactly the same results.
Best COD Warzone Graphic Settings (TLDR)
To put all of the above into a TLDR list, here are the Best Graphics Setting to reach 4K 60fps in Warzone on a RTX 2070 Super:
- Display Mode : Fullscreen for the best memory performance
- Refresh Rate : Your monitor’s native refresh rate
- Render Resolution : Best to leave this at 100
- Aspect Ratio : Automatic
- Sync Every Frame (V-Sync) : OFF to avoid input lag, ON to remove screen tearing
- Custom Framerate Limit : Set to monitor’s native refresh rate or 10fps higher
- Texture Resolution : Normal or High (Best)
- Texture Filter Anisotropic: High (Best)
- Particle Quality : High (Best)
- Bullet Impacts & Sprays : Enable (Best)
- Tessellation : All (Best)
- Shadow Map Resolution : High or Extra High (Best)
- Cache Spot Shadows : ON if you have 16GB of RAM or more
- Cache Sun Shadows : ON if you have 16GB of RAM or more
- Particle Lighting : Ultra (Best)
- Raytracing : ON or OFF, Warzone doesn’t use it, only the campaign missions do.
- Ambient Occlusion : OFF
- Screen Space Reflections (SSR) : High (Best)
- Anti-Aliasing – SMAA 1x
- Depth of Field : On or OFF, depends if you like the effect
- World Motion Blur : On or OFF, depends if you like the effect
- Weapon Motion Blur : On or OFF, depends if you like the effect
- Field of View : Personal preference, around 80° with ‘Independent’ offers best of both worlds
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Best Call of Duty Warzone Graphic Settings Conclusion
I hope you guys enjoyed this article on finding the Best Graphic Settings for Call of Duty modern Warfare and Warzone, I had a lot of fun making it.
Quite honestly I am a bit taken back by the results. I was expecting a much greater difference in performance between the ultra/max graphic settings and the lowest/off settings, but it doesn’t seem to be the case here, as the majority of the results, offered very similar fps performance, if not identical, especially in teh campaign missions.
Confusion aside, the figures don’t lie, and after 4 in depth campaign benchmarks, as well as a lot of in game Warzone benchmarks, covering an array of difference indoor, outdoor and night time environments, we can safely conclude that you should definitely put most graphical settings on their highest, except for a few.
For single player campaign missions, the exclusions are naturally Raytracing Shadows, which is quite obvious. With Raytracing OFF, you will unlock the other Anti-Aliasing options, which can also give you a nice boost in performance, with very little loss in quality.
Turning Anti-Aliasing OFF gives the biggest boost in graphical performance, but does result in some shimmering on certain surfaces and thin geometry, such as powerline cables etc. I would suggest turning on SMAA 1x instead, which most eliminates these shimmers, but also only results in a few fps loss, giving you the best of both worlds.
In some of my other benchmarks, such as Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Ambient Occlusion has a big impact on performance, but that doesn’t seem to be the situation with Call of Duty Modern Warfare’s campaign missions, as all 4 of them output very similar performance outcomes. There was however a big change when in Warzone.
Lastly, the fact that Raytracing has been removed from Call of Duty Warzone is interesting but understandable.
Best Hard Drives for Warzone
As new Warzone content and Call of Duty games get released, their size continues to grow, taking up more and more hard drive space. Below is a list of the best Hard Drives and SSD drives for PC, which will give you more than enough space to store Warzone on.
While this isn’t related to its graphic setting, it is a recurring issue for many gamers, (come update week), so though I would cover it here as well.
Your standard Hard Drive Disk (HDD) in the first column, is naturally slower than the SSD Drives in the second column, but they are also cheaper.
The cheapest of these is the WD Blue 1TB SATA HDD ($36.99), which costs less than the full game itself and can store Warzone 4 times over at its current size of 250GB.
If you uninstall game modes you don’t play such as the Single Player Campaign, Multiplayer and Spec Ops, you can get even more space out of the drive. Either way, for such a low cost you wont need to ever worry about Warzone update week again.
5400rpm vs 7200rpm
The WD Blue range are however entry level drives, as they only have a 5400rpm, which can slow you load times down.
If you have the extra $20, I would highly suggest getting the much faster WD Black 1TB SATA HDD (No products found.), which is a 7200rpm hard drive.
The WD Black series are also built to last longer and I personally have many of them in my gaming PCs, actually running Warzone off one of them and have no load time, and definitely no storage issues.
If you want even more reliability, then check out the WD Ultrastar range. They also come with a bigger cache size to speed load time up even more. The Seagate range are also amazing, and a great alternative to WD Ultrastar.
Look at getting a 4TB Drive for Warzone
In terms of size, the above mentioned drives are all 1TB, which is the lowest size drive I would recommend. Anything less is just a waste of space in your PC case. if your budget allows, then I would ideally suggest getting a 4TB, as this will provide you with a ton of space, not only for Warzone but many other games, so that you won’t have to worry again for years to come.
If not, a 1TB is absolutely fine.
SATA HHD vs SSD
While you can’t beat Standard SATA HDDs, when it comes to $ per GB, if you want more speed to lower those load time even further, then SATA SSDs are the way to go.
As the names suggest, both technologies run off the SATA interface connection, but SATA SSD (Solid State Drive) is easily 4 times faster thanks to it having no spinning parts (thus the name solid state), allowing your CPU to access data in an instant.
SSD basically makes full usage of the SATA interface’s 6gb/s (750MB/s) bandwidth speed limit, where as Standard HDD are only able to reach around 1.12gb/s (114MB/s) due to their spindle design.
Running Warzone off a SATA SSD will give you signification load time boosts over HDD, but they do cost more $ per GB.
Here again, I would suggest looking at a 1TB SATA SSD such as the Samsung 860 EVO 1TB ($149.99) as your gaming drive, on which you can install Warzone, as well as at least 10 of your other most played and favorite games.
This is a estimated average based on an average of 75GB per game (which most AAA tiles are these days) over and above Warzone at 250GB, . Naturally not all games are 75GB, with the majority between 5-20GB, with some indie games only coming in around 2GB. So your mileage will vary here depending on what you play most.
In short, you can install Warzone easily and still have tons of space, while taking advantage of SSD speeds.
Best Hard Drives for Warzone
Western Digital Blue Hard Drives on Amazon
- WD Blue 1TB SATA HDD ($36.99)
- WD Blue 2TB SATA HDD ($80.99)
- WD Blue 4TB SATA HDD ($122.00)
- WD Blue 6TB SATA HDD ($128.06)
Western Digital Black Hard Drives on Amazon
- WD Black 1TB SATA HDD (No products found.)
- WD Black 2TB SATA HDD ($98.99)
- WD Black 4TB SATA HDD ($129.99)
- WD Black 6TB SATA HDD ($179.00)
- WD Black 8TB SATA HDD ($272.54)
Western Digital UltraStar SATA Hard Drives on Amazon
- WD 1TB Ultrastar DC HA200 SATA HDD ($45.00)
- WD 2TB Ultrastar DC HA200 SATA HDD ($51.99)
- WD 4TB Ultrastar DC HC310 SATA HDD ($120.99)
- WD 6TB Ultrastar DC HC310 SATA HDD ($109.98)
- WD 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 SATA HDD ($93.62)
- WD 10TB Ultrastar DC HC510 SATA HDD ($264.45)
Seagate IronWolf PRO SATA Hard Drives on Amazon
Best SATA SSD for Warzone
Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
- Samsung 860 EVO 250GB ($39.99)
- Samsung 860 EVO 500GB ($138.50)
- Samsung 860 EVO 1TB ($149.99)
- Samsung 860 EVO 2TB ($277.00)
Western Digital Blue SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
- WD Blue 3D NAND 250GB ($54.00)
- WD Blue 3D NAND 500GB ($54.00)
- WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB ($130.00)
- WD Blue 3D NAND 2TB ($159.99)
ADATA SU635 SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
- ADATA SU635 240GB SATA SSD (Price not available)
- 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 ($40.99)
- WD Green 480GB SATA SSD ($76.00)
- WD Green 1TB SATA SSD ($95.00)
- WD Green 2TB SATA SSD ($125.00)
Crucial MX500 SATA SSD Drives on Amazon
The last two categories of hard drives for Warzone to consider, are NVMe SSD and External drives, both HDD and SSD.
NVMe vs SATA for Warzone
As SATA is around 4-5 times faster than Standard HDD, so is NVMe SSD around 4-5times faster than SATA SSD.
In short, the reason for this is due to the SATA bandwidth limitations that which cap out at 6gb/s, where as NVMe uses and entire different interface, being that of your PCIe lanes, which are ten fold faster than SATA.
You can almost instantly load Warzone from an NVMe drive. The only thing slowing you down then will be there server 🙂
The below list of NVMe drives are all based on PCIe 3.0 (using 4 lanes) which in total has a bandwidth speed limitation of 31.52gb/s (3,940MB/s). When compared to the 6gb/s (750MB/s) speed limitation of SATA, you can see just how much faster NVMe is compared to SATA.
If you are going this route, then the size of your drive will depend on your budget once again, but try to go as big as possible, as NVMe slots on motherboards are very limited. While mentioning motherboard, first make sure yours can support NVMe. The Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe ($82.99) is my recommenced choice here, but check the list below to see what best fits your budget.
There are also next gen PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives available if you want double the speed of PCIe 3.0, coming in at a whopping 56gb/s (7000MB/s), doubling the rate of PCIe 3.0.
This is more speed than you will need in a very long time, but at the current price you are paying for the best of the best performance. I have thus only put a few on the list below such as the Sabrent Rocket 1TB NVMe ($99.99).
Again, you will need a motherboard that support PCIe 4.0 as well.
External USB Drives for Warzone
The last and final option for a new Warzone hard drive are external USB drives. In general I would recommend installing Warzone on on of the above mentioned internal drives, as this will always give the fastest interaction between your drive, CPU, Graphics Card and RAM, and won’t be bottle-necked by USB.
If however there is a need to have your Warzone with you on the move or you need to have an external drive for your gaming laptop, then there are actually a lot of options, again based on your budget as well as the speed and size of the drive.
As these are simply drives in a casing, they act the very similar to all the above mentioned drives.
In a nut shell:
- Drives labeled 120-140MB/s are all your standard spinning HDD usually running off USB 3.2 Gen1 (5gb/s)
- Drives labeled 1,000MB/s are SATA SSD disks, usually running off USB 3.2 Gen2 (10gb/s)
- Drives labeled 2,000MB/s are NVMe SSD disks, usually running off USB 3.2×2 (20gb/s)
You naturally want the fastest drive you can get here, but you must first check what USB drives your motherboard supports, because if it only has USB 3.2 Gen1 (5gb/s) ports and you buy a USB 3.2×2 (20gb/s) drive, it will be bottle-necked to 5gb/s.
The new 2,000MB/s are NVMe SSD USB drives such as the WD Black P50 1TB 2000MB/s Ext SSD ($169.00) are perfect for the new Sony PlayStation 5 ($400.00) and Microsoft XBox Series X ($449.00).
Best NVMe PCIe 3.0 for Warzone
Samsung 970 EVO Plus PCIe 3.0 NVMe Drives
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250GB NVMe ($64.98)
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe ($69.69)
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe ($82.99)
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB NVMe ($159.00)
Western Digital Black SN750 PCIe 3.0 NVMe Drives
- WD Black SN750 250GB ($59.00)
- WD Black SN750 500GB NVMe ($74.90)
- WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe ($99.99)
- WD Black SN750 2TB NVMe ($155.66)
Western Digital Blue SN500 PCIe 3.0 NVMe Drives
Corsair Force MP510 PCIe 3.0 NVMe Drives
Best NVMe PCIe 4.0 for Warzone
Best External USB for Warzone
Western Digital External USB Drives on Amazon
- WD Black P10 2TB Ext 140MB/s Drive ($80.10)
- WD Black P10 4TB 120MB/s Ext Drive ($114.99)
- WD My Book 4TB 120MB/s Ext Drive ($119.99)
- WD My Book 8TB 120MB/s Ext Drive ($169.99)
- WD My Passport 500GB 1050MB/s Ext SSD ($84.49)
- WD My Passport 1TB 1050MB/s Ext SSD ($99.49)
- WD My Passport 2TB 1050MB/s Ext SSD ($159.99)
- WD Black P50 500GB 2000MB/s Ext SSD ($139.99)
- WD Black P50 1TB 2000MB/s Ext SSD ($169.00)
- WD Black P50 2TB 2000MB/s Ext SSD ($319.95)
Seagate External USB Drives on Amazon
- Seagate 1TB 120MB/s Ext Drive ($70.99)
- Seagate 2TB 120MB/s Ext Drive ($69.99)
- Seagate 4TB 120MB/s Ext Drive ($99.99)
- Seagate 500GB 400MB/s Ext SSD (Price not available)
- Seagate 1TB 400MB/s Ext SSD ($180.00)
Samsung External USB Drives on Amazon
- Samsung T5 1TB 540MB/s Ext SSD ($318.00)
- Samsung T5 2TB 540MB/s Ext SSD ($449.00)
- Samsung T7 500GB 1050MB/s Ext SSD ($77.00)
- Samsung T7 1TB 1050MB/s Ext SSD ($105.46)
- Samsung T7 2TB 1050MB/s Ext SSD ($158.67)
SanDisk External USB 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
Well guys that’s it from me, if you enjoyed this content and found it useful, please share it on your favorite social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest.
Also check out my benchmark article on the Best Graphics Settings for Call of Duty: Cold War
Happy Gaming
Ozarc (¬‿¬)