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Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Optimized Settings: MW3 Best Settings for PC

The best settings for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Season 6, optimized for high and low-end PCs

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the 20th installment in the long-running Call of Duty series and the third entry in the rebooted Modern Warfare series. With Season 6 now out and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 just around the corner, we tested the game for single and multiplayer performance. We’ll analyze every graphics setting and benchmark every option, to recommend the best graphics settings for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Season 6.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

  • Enable Resizable BAR.
  • Turn on Game Mode.
  • Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
  • Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
  • Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
  • Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
  • Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 PC Specs

To run the game at the “Low” preset settings at 1080p 60 FPS you require at least an Intel Core i5-6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 1400. Pair that with at least an NVIDIA GTX 960/GTX 1650 or the AMD RX 470. Finish it with at least 8 GB of memory and 149 GB of storage space, preferably an SSD.

Pushing it up to the recommended settings, corresponding to a “High” preset level at 1080p 60 FPS, you need an Intel Core i7-6700K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X paired with the NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti/RTX 3060 or the AMD RX 6600 XT or higher. Top it off with 16 GB of Dual Channel RAM and 149 GB of storage space.

Multiplayer: 1080p 60 FPS

  • CPU: Intel Core i3-6100|AMD Ryzen 3 1200.
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960|GTX 1650|AMD Radeon RX 470.
  • RAM: 8 GB.
  • Storage: 79 GB SSD storage.

Competitive: 144 FPS/4K 60 FPS

  • CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K|AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080|RTX 4070|AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.
  • RAM: 16 GB.
  • Storage:149 GB SSD storage.

Our Test Bench

  • CPU: Intel Core i7-14700KF.
  • Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z790 Gaming X AX.
  • Cooler: Asus ROG Strix LC II 360.
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super.
  • Memory: 16GB x2 DDR5-6000 CL36.
  • Power Supply: Corsair RM1000e.

Resolution Scaling: 1080p vs. 1440p vs. 4K Benchmarks

Note: The “Max” setting is everything in the graphics options set to the maximum possible value. By default, even the game’s “Ultra” setting doesn’t max out every setting. We’ll use this “Max” option as the reference preset.

Switching from 4K to 1440p increases performance by 47% and from 4K to 1080p by 95%. From 1440p to 1080p, that’s a 33% increase. The age-old adage is of course true, lower resolution means better frames. Keep it at your monitor’s resolution and only change it if all else fails.

Display Mode

Fullscreen Exclusive” is recommended for the best experience. This ensures your mouse is constrained to the game in a multi-monitor setup, stopping it from accidentally leaving and clicking elements on another screen. However, if you like having free access to the other screens (like Discord) and don’t mind a tiny performance hit, go with “Fullscreen Borderless“.

NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency

NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency reduces input latency. “On + Boost” increases GPU power draw by optimizing latency even in CPU-bound cases, keep that on if your CPU is of an older gen. Otherwise, “On” should work just fine.

Eco Mode Preset

For the best performance, keep this at “Custom“. Then go down and turn “Off” the V-Sync (Gameplay) and V-Sync (Menus) options, and set the Custom Frame Rate Limit to “Unlimited“. V-Sync helps synchronize frames with your monitor’s refresh rate to help prevent screen-tearing, at the cost of added latency. Turn this on if you’re getting noticeable screen tears.

Best Graphics Preset for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

We can now start with optimizations to increase our frames by going to the “Graphics” -> “Quality” tab. We’ll look at the “Render Resolution” and other upscaling options near the end if all else fails. The HDR options are also personal preferences and don’t impact performance.

COD: MW3 has seven presets going from “Minimum“, “Basic“, “Balanced“, “Ultra“, “Extreme“, “Recommended Quality” and “Recommended Performance“. As mentioned, “Max” is our preset with every setting maxed out for reference. Let’s see how they stack up.

The GeForce RTX 4080 Super (and the Core i7-14700KF) manage an average of 118.1 FPS at the 4K “Extreme” setting in COD: MW3. The following are the presets ranked in percentage gains going down from the “4K Extreme” preset to the “4K Minimum” Preset:

  • Max: -2%
  • Ultra: 6%
  • Recommended Quality: 7%
  • Balanced: 31%
  • Recommended Performance: 37%
  • Basic: 42.5%
  • Minimum: 151%

Try out the preset that nets your target frames (be it 60, 144, or 240) and we’ll proceed to toggle each option to maximize frames while maintaining visual fidelity and a competitive advantage in the coming sections.

Texture Resolution

Texture quality determines how detailed an object looks on the surface by changing the resolution of the loaded textures. This determines how much VRAM (GPU’s memory) is needed. Usually, this has negligible impact on FPS as it’s purely a VRAM-dependent issue, although certain factors such as PCIe bus speeds or a game’s optimization can cause outliers. The FPS gains are negligible compared to the loss in visual fidelity and low poly textures don’t help in any scenario.

Keep this at the highest possible value for your GPU’s VRAM budget, which in COD: MW3 is handily featured with a usage bar in the bottom right of the settings screen.

Texture Filter Anisotropic

Anisotropic filtering usually helps make distant objects look sharper, especially ones at an oblique angle to the camera. Without it, you’ll notice blurriness in textures farther seen farther away. This once again has minimal impact on FPS. Just keep this at “Normal“.

Depth of Field

This setting adds a camera lens simulation that blurs out-of-focus regions especially when aiming down the sights. Minimal performance impact, personal preference. Competitively, it’s recommended to keep this off.

Detail Quality Level

This setting adjusts the quality of objects and sound ground elements such as ground foliage, rocks and various decals. What this means is that elements like grass will have higher density, will load in farther from the camera and there’ll be generally more polygons in the environmental objects as we go higher in quality.

Going down from Max, the gains are:

  • Normal: 2.5%
  • Low: 3.1%
  • Visual Fidelity:Normal“, good FPS boost with visuals preserved.
  • Competitive: Low” to get the maximum FPS boost.

Particle Resolution

This setting adjusts the quality of lighting applied to particle effects and the display threshold of various components within it. This means the higher the quality, the more elaborate and complex the particle effects will be. Most noticeable in explosions from grenades, fires, etc

Going down from “High”, we get:

  • Normal: 1.1%
  • Low: 1.3%
  • Very Low: 4%
  • Visual Fidelity: Keep this at “Normal” for the perfect balance of particles and frames.
  • Competitive:Very Low“, lesser particle effects to distract you from the enemy ahead.

Bullet Impacts, Persistent Effects

Will enable bullet impacts to be seen on surfaces once they’ve been shot for some amount of time. This is especially useful in identifying if an enemy is nearby or if a battle has taken place in that location before. And it has minimal impact on performance and mainly is a cache/VRAM setting.

Keep it “Onin either scenario since they are important competitively as well.

Persistent effects draws visual effects when explosions and deflagrations are used near surfaces, similar to bullet impacts. Once again a VRAM effect and is better kept on to identify nearby enemies.

Shader Quality

Shaders are small programs that run to help calculate certain aspects of graphics such as pixels and how they’re represented. This in-turn affects the quality of lighting treatment applied on some surfaces and their colorization.

Going down from High we get:

  • Medium: 4.5%
  • Low: 11%
  • Visual Fidelity:Medium” to preserve the intended visual colorization by the devs.
  • Competitive:Low“, doesn’t matter if some surface looks off-colored, the enemies need blasting.

On-Demand Texture Streaming

This is a bit of an interesting option not seen in too many games. Basically, this allows surface textures to be downloaded from the internet as you play the game, “necessary to provide color details on surfaces” as the game puts it. Personally, I’m not sure why a 150+ GB install size warrants further texture downloads, but I believe the devs might have some optimization reasons, such as offloading the work from the SSD and GPU lanes.

In our test, we noticed the tiniest improvement in using it, but we’d recommend keep this off or “minimal” since they removed the off option, to prevent lag spikes or stutters caused by texture streaming. That and to save on internet bandwidth.

Local Texture Streaming Quality

Unlike online texture streaming, this setting adjust the streaming quality of distant zones for large maps from the SSD.

Keeping it low slightly increases the frames, but not by much. Keep this “On” as it’ll help you see clearer objects in the distance to pick off enemies as well.

Shadow Quality

Shadow controls the resolution and quality of the shadow maps used in-game. Higher resolutions result in sharper, higher-quality shadows. This setting also affects the cache size of spotlight shadows. Spot, or spotlight shadows, sets the number of spotlight shadows that can appear onscreen. These are shadows cast by individual static light sources, so more shadows being cast gets more taxing on the GPU.

As seen above, this setting has a significant impact on frames. Going down from Ultra we get the following benefits:

  • High: 2.8%
  • Normal: 3.1%
  • Low: 3.6%
  • Lowest: 7%
  • Visual Fidelity:High” for a decent FPS boost with high-quality visuals
  • Competitive:Lowest” to get the highest frames. Player shadows are not affected by this setting.

Screen Space Shadows

Screen Space Shadows improve the shadow quality and accuracy. They calculate the screen space lighting on a per-pixel and per-light basis, for local surfaces such as the weapon and character. Consequently, it’s more taxing in areas with more light sources.

As seen above, you get a slight FPS increase in turning it down, by around 1.5%.

  • Visual Fidelity:High
  • Competitive:Off

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion is the soft shadows and indirect lighting from the environment, intersecting to create depth. GTAO (ground truth ambient occlusion) is applied to static objects here and MDAO (Multi-Directional Ambient Occlusion) is applied to the dynamic objects.

Understandably, having both on is the most taxing. Going down from “Both” to “Off” we get the following gains:

  • GTAO: 1%
  • MDAO: 3%
  • Off: 5.1%
  • Visual Fidelity:Both“, lack of AO looks really weird in cinematic presentations.
  • Competitive: Off“, nice FPS boost and is not important in competitive scenarios.

Screen Space Reflections

Screen Space Reflections (SSR) creates reflections on shiny or reflective surfaces (like water, glass, or polished floors) by tracing rays in the screen space to gather information from visible objects, pixels, and light sources. This means that anything outside of the view of the camera is not reflected, say at an angle.

  • Visual Fidelity:Normal
  • Competitive:Off

Static Reflection Quality

Static Reflection Quality are the reflections from objects or environments that do not change or move during the rendering process. These reflections are often pre-computed and baked into the scene, meaning they don’t need to be dynamically updated in real time.

As expected, this setting has no effect on FPS aside from a slightly higher VRAM usage. Keep this “On“.

Tessellation

Tessellation increases the level of detail on 3D models by dynamically subdividing polygons into smaller pieces (called tessellation) during the rendering process. Increasing this setting increases the range of these subdivisions.

As seen in the graphs, no noticeable impact is seen.

  • Visual Fidelity:Far
  • Competitive:Off

Volumetric Quality

Volumetric quality simulates the behavior of light passing through fog, smoke, clouds, or other semi-transparent materials, creating realistic lighting interactions within “volumes” of air or gas, where light can scatter, diffuse, or cast shadows, contributing to a more immersive and atmospheric gaming experience. A very GPU heavy option.

As seen above, going down from High grants a big jump.

  • Visual Fidelity:Medium
  • Competitive:Low

Deferred Physics Quality

For objects that are less critical to gameplay, such as water here, physics calculations can be deferred or calculated at a lower priority. This allows the game engine to allocate more resources to critical tasks, improving performance, which is deferred physics quality. This will impact the CPU more, contrary to what the in-game menu states.

  • Visual Fidelity:Low“. If you want to have a really cinematic water level, High.
  • Competitive:Off

Weather Grid Volumes

Selects the quality level of weather effects applied to dynamic objects. Weather grid volumes work by splitting the environment into grids for simulating these effects.

As seen above, there’s barely any difference. Go ahead and keep this at the max preset, you won’t notice much difference in FPS and gain some shiny weather effects.

Water Quality

Enables water components to improve the quality of the water rendering. “Water Caustics” will display light rays produced by light on the ocean floor, “Wave Wetness” displays wet effects on surfaces that come in contact with water and “All” applies both these effects.

Once again, no performance impact. Keep this at “All“. Just in case, for competitive scenarios, you can keep this at “Off since the water effect and its physics can sometimes break and cause stutters.

Field of View (FOV)

Moving to the “Graphics” -> “View” tab, we get the FOV option. This sets the height and width of the in-game view, separate from the aspect ratio we picked earlier.

As seen above, both increasing and decreasing the FOV from the center option decreases frames. On the higher FOV, there’s more the render, on the lower FOV, there’s more detail to render close up. In the end, the FPS change is minimal so pick what you’re comfortable with.

Upscaling/Sharpening

The granddaddy of FPS optimizations. We’ve kept this at the end since upscaling should really not be a go-to option to magically increase frames, as this can cause stuttering with a higher CPU load. If you have an NVIDIA GPU, use the DLSS option at Quality. Anything below “Balanced” looks subpar and should be avoided.

Frame Generation is also an option for 40-series RTX card owners but introduces a significant lag in gameplay due to the additional AI frames generated. To avoid latency in competitive scenarios, keep this on during single-player missions only.

DLAA kills performance so stay away from it. FSR 3 is also a great option on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. The same goes for frame-gen in this upscaling option. Intel XeSS, FSR 1.0, and NVIDIA Image Scaling (NIS) are potential options but they perform worse or produce lower performance than DLSS/FSR 2+.

Render Resolution

Resolution scaling is a way to massively increase performance at the cost of resolution (added blurriness in upscaling). We’ve kept this at the end since it is always recommended to play at native or with the upscaling techniques mentioned above. If you are still struggling with frames after trying out all the optimized settings above, it is time to try different render resolutions.

By default, the game starts at a Render Scale of “100”, which means it is rendering at the native resolution. Going down and up from 100 we get the following boosts:

  • 125: –25%
  • 150: –50%
  • 75: 33%
  • 50: 89%
  • 25: 150%

So if you’re struggling with performance after all the previous optimizations, reduce it to 75. If you need even higher framerates, reduce the slider to 50. Ideally, you want to keep this as high as possible and find the sweet spot that produces your target FPS. Don’t go below 50.

Restart Shaders Pre-Loading

This is a very important step that allows the game to run smoothly and an incomplete one can cause straight-up crashes if not lags. By default, the game should automatically pre-compile shaders on every game launch or graphics options change, but just in case, make sure to hit this button once we’ve finished optimizing the game. It should take a couple of minutes to finish, depending on your CPU

Additional Settings

Under Documents -> Call of Duty -> Players there should be a file named “options.4.cod23.cst” which can be opened with Notepad. Make sure to create a copy of this file elsewhere before editing it.

This file contains information on the current graphics settings which can be changed beyond the in-game menu. Make sure you don’t modify anything else apart from what we mention below.

Find “RendererWorkerCount:1.0”, which should indicate the number of CPU cores being utilized for the game’s threads. Keep this at a value that is one lesser than your number of CPU cores. In case you have performance and efficiency cores, utilize only the performance cores. For example, if you have 8 P-cores, keep this at 7. That way the one P-core and the rest of the E-cores can service the background programs and your OS, allowing for minimal stuttering from thread conflicts between programs.

If any of this sounds complicated, leave this as is since it’s meant for the players who really want that competitive edge.

Once done, save and exit Notepad and launch the game. In case it doesn’t launch, replace it with the saved backup.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – CPU Bottlenecks

COD: MW3 is not CPU-bound at the higher presets, recording a complete 0%. We recorded a GPU-busy deviation of 9% at the 4K “Minimum” preset, indicating a good optimization by the devs.

4K Max Preset
4K Minimum Preset

Best Graphics Settings for Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Here are the optimized settings for Modern Warfare 3 on PC, targeting 60 to 240 FPS:

Optimized SettingsVisual Fidelity Quality (60 FPS)Visual Fidelity Balanced (144 FPS)Competitive (240 FPS)
ResolutionHigh-end: 4K
Mid-range: 4K/1440p
Low-End: 1440p/1080p
High-end: 4K/1440p
Mid-range: 1440p/1080p
Low-End: 1080p
High-end: 1440p/1080p
Mid-range: 1080p
Low-End: 1080p or Lesser
Display ModeFullscreen ExclusiveFullscreen ExclusiveFullscreen Exclusive
Refresh RateHighestHighestHighest
Aspect Ratio, Display Gamme, BrightnessPersonal ChoicePersonal ChoicePersonal Choice
NVIDIA Reflex Low LatencyOn + Boost if weak CPU, else OnOn + Boost if weak CPU, else OnOn + Boost if weak CPU, else On
Eco Mode PresetCustomCustomCustom
V-Sync Gameplay and MenusOffOffOff
Framerate LimitUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited
Texture ResolutionHigh(depending on VRAM budget)High(depending on VRAM budget)High/Normal (depending on VRAM budget)
Texture Filter AnisotropicNormalNormalNormal
Depth of FieldPersonal ChoicePersonal ChoicePersonal Choice
Detail Quality LevelHighNormalLow
Particle ResolutionHighNormalVery Low
Bullet Impacts, Persistent EffectsOnOnOn
Shader QualityHighMediumLow
On-Demand Texture StreamingOn/OptimizedMinimalOff/Minimal
Local Texture Streaming QualityOnOnOn
Shadow QualityHighestHighLowest
Screen Space ShadowsHighHighOff
Ambient OcclusionBothBothOff
Screen Space ReflectionsNormalNormalOff
Static Reflection QualityOnOnOn
TessellationFarFarOff
Volumetric QualityMediumMediumLow
Deferred Physics QualityHighLowOff
Weather Grid VolumesMaxMaxLow
Water QualityAllAllOff
Field of View (FOV)Personal ChoicePersonal ChoicePersonal Choice
Upscaling/SharpeningNative/FidelityFX Cas/DLSS Quality/FSR3 QualityDLSS Balanced/FSR3 Balanced/FidelityFX CasDLSS Performance/FSR3 Performance
Frame GenerationOnOnOff
Render Resolution100-150100-7580-50 (if needed)
High-endMid-rangeLow-end
CPUCore i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7800X3DCore i5-13600K/Ryzen 5 7600XLess than: Core i5-12400/Ryzen 5 3600
GPURTX 4070 Ti Super/RX 7900 XTRTX 4070/RX 7800 XTLess than: RTX 4060/RX 7600
Memory32GB (dual-channel)16GB (dual-channel)Less than: 16GB (dual-channel)
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