Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC Specs and Ray Tracing Lock

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC specs start low, with a GTX 970 from 2014 still on the Minimum list, and climb to 16 GB of VRAM for the Ray Tracing tier. The Modern Warfare 4 system requirements also carry hard gates that have nothing to do with your GPU, from TPM 2.0 to an AVX-capable CPU.

The game sells on PC through Xbox PC, Steam, and Battle.net. Beenox leads the PC version and works on it with Infinity Ward, and across all 16 missions, the port held up well for us.

Building on the PC section of our Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 campaign review, this page covers every spec tier, how Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 ray tracing behaves in early access, and the settings to change before your first mission.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC Specs Summary

• Minimum: GTX 970/1060, RX 470 or Arc A580, 8 GB RAM, 3 GB VRAM.

• Recommended: RTX 3060 Ti, RX 6600 XT or Arc B580 for 90 fps in multiplayer on High.

• Ray Tracing tier: RTX 5070 Ti or RX 9070 XT, 32 GB RAM, 16 GB VRAM, aimed at 4K upscaled.

• Every tier needs 115 GB on an SSD, TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and an AVX-capable CPU.

• Early access reports say ray tracing locks out DLSS, FSR, and XeSS upscaling, with RX 9000 cards the reported exception.

• Install the Xbox PC app early to get precompiled shaders through Advanced Shader Delivery.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC Specs for Every Tier

Activision lists three tiers in its Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC tech post. Minimum only promises the game will run. Recommended aims for 90 fps in multiplayer on High without manual tweaks, and the top tier targets high-quality ray tracing at 4K with upscaling.

Every tier also needs TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot switched on, a CPU with AVX instructions, DirectX 12, and 115 GB on an SSD. Intel Arc cards also need Resizable BAR enabled.

We reviewed the game on a GigaByte GeForce RTX 4080, an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and 64 GB of Kingston Fury Beast White RGB EXPO RAM. That rig sits above the Recommended tier and has the 16 GB of VRAM the Ray Tracing tier asks for.

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How Does Ray Tracing Work in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4?

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 ray tracing adds reflections, shadows, and lighting effects in Campaign, Multiplayer, and DMZ. The campaign's night missions show it best. Our reviewer played every mission with ray tracing on at native resolution, and it stayed smooth without a single crash.

GameGPU and ComputerBase both reported during campaign early access that enabling ray tracing blocks DLSS 4.5, FSR, and XeSS upscaling, leaving Filmic SMAA T2X anti-aliasing at native resolution. DLSS Ray Reconstruction isn't supported either.

According to GameGPU, technical specialist Mark-Alexandre Milo said on X that the lock is deliberate. In internal testing, the game's own ray denoiser produced distortion, artifacts, and blurry textures when paired with third-party neural upscalers. ComputerBase found one exception: Radeon RX 9000 cards can run FSR Ray Regeneration alongside FSR 4.1, and they gave the best ray-traced image in its tests.

The lock sits awkwardly next to a Ray Tracing tier built around 4K upscaled, and nobody outside the studio knows whether a patch will lift it. GeForce owners at 1440p or 4K can test ray tracing at native resolution, then drop it for DLSS if the frame rate sinks too far.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC Settings to Change First

Install the Xbox PC app before preloading, whichever store you bought from. It handles Advanced Shader Delivery, which sends precompiled shaders at install and with live updates. NVIDIA's compatible driver was promised before launch, and GeForce owners without it will sit through a long shader compile on first boot.

Let that compile run to the end. Open beta players on r/CODWarzone reported hitches on weapon swaps and map loads. Finishing the shader preload, then redoing it after each driver update, was the standard fix.

The menu holds more than 800 options across graphics, gameplay, input, and interface. The PC-only Enhanced FOV uses a lens-based effect to widen the view near the screen edges, keeping the center untouched. HDR10+, ultrawide, and split World and Weapon depth of field are also in.

Want a real read on campaign performance? Skip the built-in benchmark, which runs a simulated multiplayer sequence. Play a night mission instead and watch the in-game VRAM display.

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Final Words

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC specs are generous at the bottom end, with a 12-year-old GTX 970 still listed. TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and AVX are the lines to check first, so sort them out in the BIOS before launch night.

Ray tracing looks good in the campaign's dark levels, but the upscaling lock puts the full cost on native resolution for anyone without an RX 9000 card. Activision's own spec sheet points to 4K upscaled, so a change would make sense, though nobody has promised one.

Two things to watch after October 23 are NVIDIA's shader driver and any patch note that touches upscaling with ray tracing on. Until then, play the campaign with ray tracing at native resolution if your card holds it, and turn it off for multiplayer, where frame rate counts for more than reflections.

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