Modern Warfare 3: Best Graphics Settings for Low-End PC

Modern Warfare 3 is out now, and gamers worldwide have gathered this weekend to enjoy the new installment in the Call of Duty Series. However, players with low-end PCs haven’t been able to enjoy the game yet because the game is not optimized correctly.

The game’s system requirements are not high, but you still need a medium-end PC to run the game at 144 FPS at all times. I took a quick look at the Steam Hardware survey page, and it turns out that the RTX 3060 is the most used card among the Steam population.

In this guide, I have carefully picked the settings that will help you get higher FPS on low-end computers. Remember that these settings were tested on a PC running an RTX 3060 with i5 10th Gen. I was able to achieve consistent 144FPS at all times.

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Best MW3 Graphics Settings for Low-End PC

Display Settings

• Display Mode: Fullscreen Exclusive

• Display Monitor: Select the primary monitor

• Display Adapter: Your GPU

• Screen Refresh Rate: 144Hz

• Display Resolution: Select your native resolution.

• Dynamic Resolution: Off

• Aspect Ratio: Auto

• V-Sync Gameplay: Off

• V-Sync Menu: off

• Custom Frame Rate Limit: Gameplay at 150, Menu at 120, and Out of Focus at 30.

• Display Gamma: 2.2 SRGB

• Focused Mode: Off

It might make sense to turn on Dynamic Resolution if you have a very old GPU. But this will occasionally make the game look weird, as your textures will be adjusted dynamically.

Quality Settings

• Quality Preset: Custom

• Upscaling or Sharpening: AMD FSR 2.1 Balanced

• Anti-aliasing: Filmic SMAA T2X

• Variable Rate Shading: Off

• Video Memory Scale: 90

• Texture Resolution: Low

• Texture Filter Anisotropic: Low

• Depth of Field: Off

• Detail Quality Level: Low

• Particle Resolution: Low

• Bullet Impact and Sprays: Off

• Persistent Effects: Off

• Shader Quality: Low

• Tessellation: off

• Terrain Memory: Max

• On-Demand Texture Streaming: Off

• Local Texture Streaming Quality: Normal

• Volumetric Quality: Low

• Deferred Physics Quality: Off

• Water Quality: Default

• Screen Space Shadows: Off

• Shadow Quality: Low

• Ambient Occlusion: On

• Screen Space Reflections: Off

• Weather Grid Volumes: Low

• Nvidia Reflex Low Latency: On + Boost

• World Motion Blur: Off

• Weapon Motion Blur: Off

• Film Grain: Zero

Note: Ensure you have selected “Let the 3D application decide” from the Nvidia Control Panel. Else it will override a lot of game settings.

During Beta, the best upscaling solution was FSR, but things might change during launch as Nvidia has released multiple drivers since then. Check out my FPS Drops guide that covers more about it. I will be testing this and posting the numbers soon.

View Settings

You can adjust these settings according to your personal preference. These generally wouldn’t have any effect on performance.

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While these settings might not work for everyone, they will work for most. The main objective is putting everything at low while ensuring visibility is not affected. You can see your enemies clearly, and gameplay won’t be affected if there are no performance issues.

If you’re still facing issues, comment below with your hardware details, and I will try to help you.