Figuring out the best Modern Warfare 2 settings can make the game run at high FPS, even with a low-end gaming PC. But picking the right combination of Modern Warfare 2 graphics settings can be difficult, particularly when it comes to visuals, which can degrade to unbearable levels when choosing the wrong config.
While Modern Warfare 2 does offer some quality presets, we discovered through our in-house testing that customizing your settings is best. Our suggested Modern Warfare 2 settings avoid degrading the visuals to a blurry mess, which can happen when using certain quality presets. Read on to find the best graphics settings for your setup.
Table of Contents
Update your graphics drivers
Do yourself a favor and check for recent graphics drivers updates before using our suggested best settings for Modern Warfare 2. Fortunately, updating your graphics drivers takes less than a few minutes and can provide a great FPS boost.
Best Modern Warfare 2 settings for low-end PCs
It’s best to start with our suggested low-end Modern Warfare 2 settings if your gaming PC is having a hard time pushing out more than 100 FPS or doesn’t meet the game’s recommended system requirements (we detail the system requirements a few sections below).
Keep in mind that these settings prioritize achieving competitively-high FPS at the expense of visual quality. So, you may find it best to try the below settings and adjust upward some textures and other graphics settings as needed to find the lineup that works best for your gaming PC.
Display
- Display mode: Fullscreen exclusive
- Display monitor: Select your gaming monitor
- Display adapter: Select your GPU
- Screen refresh rate: Auto
- Display resolution: 1920×1080 (1080p)
- Dynamic resolution: Off
- Aspect ratio: Automatic
- V-sync gameplay: Off
- V-sync menus: Off
- Custom framerate limit: Custom
- Gameplay custom frame rate limit: 200
- Menu custom frame rate limit: 60
- Out-of-focus custom frame rate limit: 30
- Display gamma: 2.2 (sRGB) for monitors, 2.4 (BT1886) for tv’s
- Brightness: 60 to 70
- Focused mode: Off
- HDR: Off
Global quality
- Quality presets: Custom
- Render resolution: N/A, locked when enabling NVIDIA image scaling
- Upscaling/sharpening: NVIDIA image scaling
- NVIDIA image scaling preset: Quality
- NVIDIA image scaling sharpness: 0.3
- Anti-aliasing: SMAA T2X
- Anti-aliasing quality: Normal
- Video memory scale: 85
Details and textures
- Texture resolution: Very low
- Texture filter anisotropic: Low
- Nearby level of detail: High
- Distant level of detail: High
- Clutter draw distance: Short
- Particle quality: Low
- Particle quality level: Very low
- Bullet impacts and sprays: On
- Shader quality: Low
- Tesselation: Off
- Terrain memory: Min
- On-demand texture streaming: Off
- Streaming quality: Low
- Volumetric quality: Low
- Deferred physics quality: Off
- Water caustics: Off
Shadow and lighting
- Shadow map resolution: Very low
- Screen space shadows: Off
- Spot shadow quality: Low
- Spot cache: Low
- Particle lighting: Low
- Ambient occlusion: Off
- Screen space reflection: Off
- Static reflection quality: Low
- Weather grid volumes: Off
Post-processing effects
- NVIDIA reflex low latency: On + boost
- Depth of field: Off
- World motion blur: Off
- Weapon motion blur: Off
- Film grain: 0
Pro tip
After savings your settings, jump into Modern Warfare 2’s benchmark mode to see how your gaming PC performs. Benchmark mode will let you see the visuals for your settings config and provide you with average FPS.
Best Modern Warfare 2 settings for high-end PCs
Our suggested Modern Warfare 2 graphics settings for high-end gaming PCs can get most mid-range and higher setups into the 200+ FPS club. Better yet, this can be achieved with a good visual experience that is detailed where it matters most.
Display
- Display mode: Fullscreen exclusive
- Display monitor: Select your gaming monitor
- Display adapter: Select your GPU
- Screen refresh rate: Auto
- Display resolution: 1920×1080 (1080p) or 2560×1440 (2K)
- Dynamic resolution: Off
- Aspect ratio: Automatic
- V-sync gameplay: Off
- V-sync menus: Off
- Custom framerate limit: Custom
- Gameplay custom frame rate limit: 300
- Menu custom frame rate limit: 60
- Out-of-focus custom frame rate limit: 30
- Display gamma: 2.2 (sRGB) for monitors, 2.4 (BT1886) for tv’s
- Brightness: 60 to 70
- Focused mode: Off
- HDR: Off
Global quality
- Quality presets: Custom
- Render resolution: 100
- Upscaling/sharpening: Off
- Anti-aliasing: SMAA T2X
- Anti-aliasing quality: Normal
- Video memory scale: 90
Details and textures
- Texture resolution: Low
- Texture filter anisotropic: Low
- Nearby level of detail: High
- Distant level of detail: High
- Clutter draw distance: Short
- Particle quality: Low
- Particle quality level: Low
- Bullet impacts and sprays: On
- Shader quality: Low
- Tesselation: Off
- Terrain memory: Min
- On-demand texture streaming: Off
- Streaming quality: Low
- Volumetric quality: Low
- Deferred physics quality: Off
- Water caustics: Off
Shadow and lighting
- Shadow map resolution: Normal
- Screen space shadows: Off
- Spot shadow quality: Low
- Spot cache: Low
- Particle lighting: Normal
- Ambient occlusion: Off
- Screen space reflection: Normal
- Static reflection quality: Low
- Weather grid volumes: Off
Post-processing effects
- NVIDIA reflex low latency: On + boost
- Depth of field: Off
- World motion blur: Off
- Weapon motion blur: Off
- Film grain: 0
Your mileage will vary on these high-end settings based on your gaming PCs specs. For example, gaming PCs on the bleeding edge are able to generate 200+ FPS in Modern Warfare 2 at 2K and 4K resolutions.
Modern Warfare 2 system requirements
As with prior generations of Call of Duty games, Modern Warfare 2 is one of the more demanding triple-A games. We detail below Modern Warfare 2’s system requirements, along with the specs of our gaming PC used in our in-house testing.
| Specs | OS | CPU | RAM | Storage | GPU |
| Minimum | Windows 10 64-bit | Intel Core i3-6100 or Core i5-2500K, AMD Ryzen 5 1600X | 8GB | 125GB | NVIDIA GTX 670, AMD Radeon RX 470 |
| Recommended | Windows 10 64-bit | Intel Core i5-6600K or Core i7-4770K, AMD Ryzen 7 1400 | 12GB | 125GB | NVIDIA GTX 1060, AMD Radeon RX 580 |
| Tested gaming PC | Windows 10 64-bit | Intel Core i7-12700KF | 32GB | 1TB | NVIDIA RTX 3070ti |
In-house test results
We tested our suggested settings and Modern Warfare 2’s quality presets on our gaming PC can be best described as “mid-range”. We were able to generate competitively-high FPS in multiplayer on both our suggested low-end and high-end settings.
On our low-end settings, our system generated frames in a range of 190 to 205 FPS. At our high-end settings, we were consistently getting 160 to 180 FPS.
We should expect this performance to creep up over time as the game is optimized throughout and after its launch.
Important Modern Warfare graphics 2 settings
High FPS and low latency are two of the more important factors to get a competitive advantage in Modern Warfare 2. That doesn’t mean you can’t also have a good visual experience.
If our suggested graphics settings are either not generating high enough FPS or the visual quality you desire, it’s best to focus on customizing the below Modern Warfare 2 settings that have the biggest impact on FPS, latency, and visual quality.
Meaningful impacts on FPS and visual quality
- Display resolution
- Render resolution
- Upscaling/sharpening
- Texture resolution
- Streaming quality
- Volumetric quality
- Spot cache
- Static reflection quality
Meaningful impacts on latency
- Display mode
- NVIDIA Reflex
Should you use Modern Warfare 2’s quality presets?
Most gamers should skip using Modern Warfare 2’s quality presets. We haven’t found many games where it makes sense to run with the developer-provided quality presets. The same theme holds true with Modern Warfare 2 and its Minimum, Basic, Balanced, Ultra, and Extreme presets.
If you have a low-end gaming PC, you may be tempted to just select the Minimum preset. While you’ll achieve high FPS, the visuals in-game are extremely pixelated and blurry.
Instead, our suggested low-end Modern Warfare 2 settings improve some of the graphics quality of the Minimum preset while retaining high FPS.
Our suggested high-end graphics settings slightly beat out the FPS highs achieved on the Balanced preset. Importantly, graphics quality is retained, and the unnecessary enhancements pro Call of Duty players avoid are disabled, such as motion blur and depth of field.
Here are the test results we encountered when running each quality preset.
| Quality Preset | FPS | Visual Quality |
| Minimum | 220 to 240 | Very poor |
| Basic | 190 to 210 | Ok |
| Balanced | 160 to 170 | Good |
| Ultra | 140 to 150 | Great |
| Extreme | 110 to 125 | Excellent |
Other graphics settings to consider
Our focus for this guide is on helping you find the best settings for Modern Warfare 2 with a focus on increasing FPS for competitive advantages and good visual quality. Adjusting your FOV can also give you a competitive advantage and adjusting your NVIDIA filters improves the vibrance and clarity in Modern Warfare 2, along with improving the visibility of other players.
Modern Warfare 2 FOV
Most PC players will want to adjust their Modern Warfare 2 FOV in the range of 105 to 120. The higher the FOV the further zoomed out, which helps you spot players faster in your periphery. The downside is higher FOVs make it more difficult to gun down enemies at a further distance. As your aiming skills improve, level up your FOV from 105.
NVIDIA filters for Modern Warfare 2
Adjusting your NVIDIA filters packs in a one-two punch to help you find enemies faster by improving visibility while making the game more vibrant with additional clarity.
