Call of Duty Modern Warfare PC system requirements land, dont panic, lower than beta specs

Written by Jon Sutton on Thu, Oct 10, 2019 8:55 AM
System Requirements Optimum 1080p PC Build Low vs Ultra Screenshots GPU Performance Chart CPU List That Meet System Requirements GPU List That Meet System Requirements

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare comes in with its full release system requirements right off the back of Red Dead 2's specs. We saw their provisional system requirements back on September 19th, when they ran their recent Beta test.

The first thing that will jump out in these specs is that it requires 175GB of install space on your hard drives. Red Dead 2 was asking for 150GB and that was already an eye opener. It looks like our hard drives are about to get decimated. It will be interesting to see if this install data requirement is going to be a growing trend with AAA titles. Right lets get into these COD Modern Warfare specs and see how our PC's can run it.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare Minimum System Requirements

  • OS: Windows 7 64-bit (SP1) or Windows 10 64-bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300
  • RAM: 8 GB System Memory
  • GPU RAM: 2 GB Video Memory
  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 / GTX 1650 or AMD Radeon HD 7950 - DirectX 12.0 compatible
  • HDD: 175 GB Available Hard Drive Space
  • DX: DirectX 11

Call of Duty Modern Warfare Recommended System Requirements

  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit Latest Update
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen R5 1600X
  • RAM: 12 GB System Memory
  • GPU RAM: 4 GB Video Memory
  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 / GTX 1660, or AMD Radeon R9 390 / RX 580 - DirectX 12.0 compatible
  • HDD: 175 GB Available Hard Drive Space
  • DX: DirectX 12

Call of Duty Modern Warfare minimum specs assessment

Looking at the low end specs above shows us that COD Modern Warfare have lowered their CPU specs slightly. The graphics requirement is an AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 or an older Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 to run low graphics settings. Pair these with the Intel Core i3-4340 3.6GHz or AMD FX-6300 processor or better to achieve 30FPS on a 1080p monitor res at low graphics settings. You will also require 8 GB RAM to meet the minimum system memory needed. Your graphics card will need to be capable of running at least DirectX 11 to get COD MW to run. So overall we expect that just to get this latest 2019 release of Call of Duty to run on PC you will need to have a 4 year old PC, with hardware being fairly modern to reach the minimum system settings.

As we mentioned above it seems like the massive 175GB storage space to install this version might be a cause for concern for those of us that have slow internet connections. This figure may also rise as additional post-launch maps are released.

And, as ever where playing modern Call of Duty online, Activision recommends you have at least 5 Mbps upload and download speeds for optimal multiplayer performance.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare recommended requirements assessment

Ok so you want to run COD Modern Warfare in all its glory, right then you have come to the right place. The PC version of Call of Duty Modern Warfare will certainly look great, providing the better looking experience when compared to its console versions. Maybe you are after better frame rates and a more impressive graphical experience or perhaps to bump up to the higher screen resolutions on PC then you will be looking for hardware that can deliver the COD MW PC recommended requirements. Lets see what power graphics cards you will need to meet the recommended graphic requirement will be either an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or the AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB. Both of these GPUs aren't particularly high-end for recommended specs and should ensure COD MW can run at High graphics on a wide range of PC gaming systems.

Add into your gaming PC a processor like either the AMD Ryzen R5 1600X or Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz CPU to reach the processor rec sys requirements. We noticed that the processor recommended requirement was lowered compared to that seen in the beta requirements a few weeks back. This hardware combination for PC will return 60 Frames a second at a graphics setting of High, on a 1080p screen resolution when playing Modern Warfare, providing you have 12GB RAM. The RAM also lowered from the 16GB requirement we saw in the beta.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare on 1440p and 4K resolutions

For those gamers looking to run a larger monitor screen size setup with Modern Warfare to get it to run with stable FPS on 1440p screen resolution you will be looking at the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB or AMD Radeon RX 5700 8GB if you are after some high end graphics settings as well. You can always adjust the multitude of COD MW graphics options to find a more stable frame rate for 1440p.

To get Modern Warfare running on 4K and around the High graphics settings mark you will be needing at least a Nvidia RTX 2070 Super 8GB or perhaps an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB and even then you will probably have to adjust a few of the graphics settings down from some of the default High settings. Faster video cards such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super 8GB, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and AMD Radeon VII 16GB can potentially play Call of Duty MW at 4K/Ultra with high frame rates.

Please note that these are all provisional guidelines, and we will be running our PC hardware tests for a variety of resolutions as soon as we get our hands on the PC build in the coming weeks.

Will Call of Duty Modern Warfare on PC support real-time ray-tracing?

Yes, Call of Duty Modern Warfare on PC will include support for Nvidia's RTX-powered ray-tracing features and so the Min and rec system requirements above are going to be for Ray tracing disabled. more specifically, COD: Modern Warfare will support ray-traced shadows.

Again you will be looking for one of the RTX Nvidia cards to enjoy these improved visuals. We are getting whispers of AMD producing a range of cards that will have ray tracing capabilities, so hopefully it wont be a one sided RT tech space soon.

What game engine does Call of Duty Modern Warfare use?

Call of Duty Modern Warfare has been built on a brand new game engine and has been developed over the past 5 years and will be seen used in a number of other upcoming games. At the moment we think they are still going with the game engine name of IW Engine.

What PC Graphics Options will Call of Duty Modern Warfare have?

This PC version will include high resolution support, unlocked frame rates, powerful extended draw distances, and improved shadow mapping and the new game engine will be delivering advanced photogrammetry and rendering, better volumetric lighting, and the use of ray tracing.

This version of COD Modern Warfare is going to be the best looking version of the modern warfare series to date.

When is Modern Warfare out on PC?

COD MW launches on PC on October 25th

As ever, remember you can always check out how well your PC can run the Call of Duty Modern Warfare System Requirements here, where you can check benchmarks and performance from other users. Compare your graphics card to the Call of Duty Modern Warfare GPU benchmark chart and we also have an COD Modern Warfare Frames Per Second system performance chart for you to check.

Our favourite comments:

"brand new game engine" sigh... we'll see

SilentWraith888

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19:34 Oct-11-2019

MY GOD. Recommended is actually my rig :O :O :O

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05:21 Oct-11-2019

Why not separate SP and MP?In this day and age it should be common thing for games like those.I don't care about MP.

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19:14 Oct-10-2019

Whats with these games lately 100GB+ for installs i missed the days it was 30GB or less.

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13:57 Oct-12-2019

a particular repacker (fit*irl)said most of this is either bloated files that not getting clean up before shipped, or lossless files like cutscene and audio that hog entire hdd space

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14:44 Oct-12-2019

I miss the 4.7GB or less days, but oh well...


@Silentreaderr
It's losseless textures and animations. BO3 started at 50GB and due to all the textures and skins and the end-match gestures it's not 95GB without any DLC.

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16:08 Oct-10-2019

Hope 4k textures are optional so that will make hdd space smaller, also its COD so most of that will be the pre rendered cutscenes most likely

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15:59 Oct-10-2019

175 GB? what to do with my porn...i mean...my family photos then?

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16:20 Oct-10-2019

Hol' Up

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19:28 Oct-10-2019

Sweet home Alabama

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23:46 Oct-12-2019

sometimes you can tell a lot about a person from their jokes

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13:49 Oct-10-2019

So... if you want to buy Red Dead 2 & Modern Warfare, you'll need 315 GB of storage... looks like Santa will have to bring SSDs under the Christmas tree this year :p

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14:08 Oct-10-2019

And if you add final fantasy 15 it's 465GB

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11:26 Oct-10-2019

And this is the fault of graphics, textures, animations and such... screw all of them... -_-


For consoles it's all good, those 1TB blu ray drives might come soon with next gen consoles, but for PC? We are screwed... we have to download the whole thing, or install it, doesn't matter.


And next gen consoles are NOT even out yet... What in 3-5 years we are going ot have 250-500GB games?


Compress those textures at least...

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19:30 Oct-10-2019

Make it an option to download ultra resolution textures as a free DLC, downloadbable content

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09:10 Oct-11-2019

Dude make everything above 1k textures optional and remove dumb stupid gesture animations and skins and other textures that are not default.

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13:26 Oct-13-2019

Imagine having the game auto download every non default texture when it loads it for the first time lmao.

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11:12 Oct-10-2019

I honestly can't believe a game like Call Of Duty would require 175GB, it's not a massive open world game. Seems to me like they didn't bother to compress it at all..

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19:31 Oct-10-2019

The graphics from the beta weren't impressive at all. The trailers and videos on youtube looked much better.

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10:59 Oct-10-2019

175 gb?
if we keep going this way, probably single game size will be larger than my homework folder

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11:08 Oct-10-2019

175 GB yeah almost as big as ARK: Survival Evolved

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12:24 Oct-10-2019

thats a lot of homework you got there

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13:51 Oct-10-2019

Yes...homework. :D

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09:44 Oct-10-2019

"bravo six... going low"

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09:41 Oct-10-2019

Activision Support
@ATVIAssist
"For an optimal in-game experience we recommend a minimum of 5 Mbps upload and download."
I had map loading issue on beta test this what i got as answer from support

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09:47 Oct-10-2019

Nice one, I think we will add that into the article

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09:08 Oct-10-2019

Another massive storage requirement. Interesting that the CPU and RAM specs went down compared to the beta requirements a few weeks ago. Also interesting that the AMD recommended CPU is so much more powerful than the Intel one. I find it much easier to compare now that we have added that hover over on hardware. What do you guys think?

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11:09 Oct-10-2019

You could see the hardware by hovering for years now.

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15:40 Oct-10-2019

He's talking about hovering over hardware linked in the article. He's the creator of the site I believe.

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19:32 Oct-11-2019

Yes to both of those things JDeano. Hugs F

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09:04 Oct-10-2019

"brand new game engine" sigh... we'll see

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11:33 Oct-10-2019

It is a brand new engine. The reason it's so big is all the dumb textures and animations... in the form of skins for the characters and all the millions of skins for the weapons and now their attachements... and then the gestures and all that crap.


CoD Black OPs3 started at 50GB, by 2018 it became 95GB all due to textures, and gestures and bs like that... WITH NO DLC.

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Can They Run... |

| 60FPS, Ultra, 1440p
Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core 3.8GHz GeForce RTX 3090 Zotac Gaming Trinity 24GB 32GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
| 30FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 2600 GeForce GTX 1660 Gigabyte OC 6GB 16GB
| 60FPS, Low, 1080p
Ryzen 5 5500U 6-Core 2.1GHz GeForce GTX 1650 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1440p
Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core 3.8GHz Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB 32GB
| 60FPS, Medium, 720p
Core i5-10300H 4-Core 2.50GHz GeForce GTX 1650 8GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz GeForce GTX 1060 Gigabyte Mini ITX OC 6GB 32GB
0% No [1 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core 3.6GHz Radeon RX 5700 PowerColor Red Dragon 8GB 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
0% No [1 votes]
| 60FPS, Ultra, 4k
Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Asus ROG Strix OC 11GB 32GB
| 30FPS, Ultra, 1440p
Ryzen 5 2600X 6-Core 3.6GHz GeForce GTX 1080 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]