Call of Duty — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Texture Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Call of Duty: CoD texture streaming has been problematic. Ultra requires 10GB+ VRAM. GPU with 8GB should use High to avoid texture streaming hitches.

Typical impact 0-2% · 2% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Texture Filtering at Ultra (2% fps cost).

Determines the sampling method when textures are viewed at oblique angles. Bilinear samples a single mip; trilinear blends between two mip levels to remove seams. Anisotropic filtering takes multiple samples along the axis of greatest compression, preserving sharpness on surfaces like roads and floors seen at steep angles. Modern GPUs have dedicated anisotropic filtering hardware in the texture units, making even 16x virtually free.

In Call of Duty: IW 9.0 exposes anisotropic filtering quality through this menu. Low applies bilinear filtering, which visibly blurs ground textures and flat surfaces at oblique angles — particularly obvious on Warzone's desert terrain and urban pavement. High and Ultra enable 8x and 16x anisotropic filtering respectively. Given that modern GPU texture units execute anisotropic sampling in dedicated hardware with near-zero ALU overhead, there is no practical reason to drop below High. The FPS delta between Low and Ultra is within noise on any current GPU.

Typical impact 8-25% · 12% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (12% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Call of Duty: IW 9.0 shadow quality heavily affects Warzone performance on large maps. Ultra uses 4K shadow maps with 4-cascade system. Medium saves 15% FPS.

Typical impact 3-12% · 8% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Particle Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Controls particle system density, simulation complexity, and render quality. Higher settings increase maximum particle count per emitter, enable GPU-driven particle simulation in compute shaders (position, velocity, lifetime, collision), and use soft particle blending (sampling the depth buffer to fade particles near surface intersections). The overdraw cost from thousands of alpha-blended billboard quads is the primary performance concern — each particle that overlaps another requires a separate blending operation.

In Call of Duty: Controls the emitter budget, GPU particle simulation complexity, and screen-space soft-particle blending for all in-game VFX — weapon muzzle flash, explosion debris, smoke grenades, and environmental effects. IW 9.0 uses compute-shader-driven GPU particles at High and Ultra, adding per-particle collision and lighting integration that Low and Medium skip. In high-intensity Warzone firefights with overlapping explosions, Ultra particle quality produces significant overdraw from layered transparent quads. Dropping to Low cuts particle count and disables soft-particle depth testing, recovering 5–8% FPS during sustained combat.

Typical impact 5-15% · 4% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Tessellation at Medium (4% fps cost).

Enables hardware tessellation via hull and domain shaders (DX11+) to dynamically subdivide mesh surfaces and displace them using heightmaps. The hull shader determines the tessellation factor per patch, and the tessellation unit generates new vertices that the domain shader displaces using a heightmap texture. The cost scales quadratically with tessellation factor — a factor of 16 generates 256x more triangles than the input mesh. Most expensive on terrain and water surfaces with large screen coverage.

In Call of Duty: When enabled, IW 9.0 applies hardware tessellation via hull and domain shaders to terrain surfaces and select environmental geometry — rocky outcrops, rubble piles, and specific structural elements across both multiplayer maps and Warzone. Higher tessellation factors subdivide input patches and displace vertices using a heightmap, increasing geometric fidelity along silhouette edges. The cost is map-dependent: terrain-heavy Warzone areas show 6–10% GPU overhead at High versus Off. Multiplayer maps with less terrain exposure see minimal impact. Low is a reasonable middle ground that retains visible surface displacement without the quadratic vertex cost of High.

Typical impact 5-18% · 8% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (8% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Call of Duty: IW 9.0 renders volumetric fog using a 3D froxel volume texture ray-marched per pixel, with each froxel sampling the shadow map to accumulate direct light scatter via the Henyey-Greenstein phase function. This is visible in Warzone as atmospheric haze across long sightlines and in interiors as light shaft streaks through windows. At High, the froxel grid is dense enough to produce smooth, accurate fog scattering — and expensive enough to cost 8–12% frametime in fog-heavy zones. Low reduces froxel resolution significantly, sacrificing volumetric detail for a 6–9% FPS recovery. Off eliminates the pass entirely, though atmospheric depth noticeably flattens.

Typical impact 5-15% · 6% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Screen Space Reflections at Medium (6% fps cost).

Computes reflections by ray-marching through the depth buffer in screen space. For each reflective pixel, a reflection ray is traced using hierarchical Z-buffer tracing (Hi-Z) — stepping through mip levels of the depth buffer to quickly find intersections. Higher settings increase the maximum ray march steps (16 to 128), enable multi-bounce SSR (tracing a second reflection from the hit point), and use higher-resolution tracing. The fundamental limitation is that SSR can only reflect what is visible on screen — off-screen geometry produces fallback cubemap reflections.

In Call of Duty: CoD SSR is used on wet surfaces and vehicles. The Warzone map has many reflective surfaces — Ultra SSR is expensive on open maps.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (5% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Call of Duty: AO in IW 9.0 runs as a fullscreen compute pass during the deferred lighting phase, estimating occlusion in corners, under cover overhangs, and between structural elements. High uses a GTAO-style horizon search with cosine-weighted integration — noticeably more accurate than SSAO at shadow contact regions on building interiors and vehicle geometry. The pass costs 4–8% of total frame time at High resolution. Low applies a coarser SSAO with fewer samples per pixel, which still grounds objects and darkens crevices adequately for competitive play. Off is a meaningful FPS recovery of 5–7% with the most visible quality loss around ground contact points.

Typical impact 2-15% · 4% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at Filmic SMAA T2x (4% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Call of Duty: IW 9.0 offers SMAA (a single-frame edge-detection pass using Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing) and Filmic SMAA T2x, which layers temporal accumulation on top of SMAA using motion vectors to resolve sub-pixel detail across frames. Filmic SMAA T2x produces noticeably cleaner geometry edges and reduces texture shimmer, particularly visible on chain-link fences and distant foliage, at the cost of mild ghosting on fast camera movement — a known IW engine trait. SMAA alone is cheaper and sharper but leaves more residual aliasing. If using DLSS or FSR, their internal temporal resolvers supersede this setting — select Off to avoid double-processing.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Call of Duty, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Call of Duty: IW 9.0 integrates DLSS 2/3, routing motion vectors and depth through the DLSS Transformer model on NVIDIA Tensor Cores. Quality mode renders the scene at approximately 67% of native pixel count before neural reconstruction, delivering near-native image quality with 25–40% FPS improvement depending on resolution — the gains are largest at 4K where the GPU is most fragment-bound. Performance mode (50% render scale) is viable for competitive play where target framerates above 120 fps matter more than image stability. DLSS Frame Generation on RTX 40-series further multiplies perceived framerate by inserting AI-synthesized frames between real ones, though this adds latency — pair with Reflex to offset it.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Call of Duty, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Call of Duty: FSR 2 in IW 9.0 operates as a temporal upscaler running on standard compute units, making it GPU-agnostic and available on all vendors. The pipeline uses jitter-accumulated reconstruction with motion vector dilation and luminance instability weighting to produce a sharper output than FSR 1's spatial-only approach. At Quality mode (approximately 67% render scale), FSR 2 delivers 20–35% FPS improvement across resolutions. Ghosting is more visible than DLSS on fast-moving objects near the screen edge — a minor concern in fast-paced multiplayer. For AMD GPU owners, FSR 2 Quality is the recommended baseline configuration for 1440p and 4K play.

Typical impact -25-65% · no measurable cost

In Call of Duty, the recommended preset leaves Intel XeSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Intel Xe Super Sampling — a temporal upscaling technology that uses machine learning inference to reconstruct high-resolution frames from lower-resolution input. On Intel Arc GPUs, XeSS runs on dedicated XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) AI accelerator hardware. On non-Intel GPUs, XeSS falls back to a DP4a (dot product of 4 8-bit integers) shader implementation that runs on standard compute units. The neural network takes the current low-resolution color buffer, motion vectors, depth, and responsive masks as input. Quality mode renders at ~77% of native, Performance at ~50%.

In Call of Duty: XeSS in IW 9.0 uses Intel's temporal upscaling pipeline — on Arc GPUs it leverages XMX matrix hardware for inference, on NVIDIA and AMD it falls back to a DP4a compute shader path. The DP4a path produces results competitive with FSR 2 at similar quality settings but may not reach DLSS reconstruction accuracy. Quality mode targets approximately 77% of native resolution, offering a modest FPS uplift of 15–25% — lower than FSR 2 at equivalent quality because the render scale is higher. XeSS is the recommended upscaler for Intel Arc users and a reasonable FSR 2 alternative on other hardware when image stability at Quality preset is the priority.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Depth of Field at On (1% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Call of Duty: In IW 9.0, depth of field is applied during killcam sequences, cutscene transitions, and the pre-match cinematic drop. During active gameplay it affects ADS blur on the background when using certain optical attachments and the out-of-focus foreground blur in third-person lobby views. The implementation uses a circle-of-confusion pass derived from the depth buffer followed by a separable Gaussian or bokeh gather blur — cost is 2–5% of frame time when active. Disabling it has no visual impact during live gameplay since the effect is suppressed during first-person play, making this a clean 2–3% FPS save for most sessions with zero competitive downside.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Call of Duty, we recommend Motion Blur at High (2% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Call of Duty: IW 9.0 implements per-object motion blur using velocity vectors written during the G-buffer pass — each moving object generates a 2D screen-space velocity, and the post-process shader samples along that vector to produce directional smearing. At High, the sample count and maximum blur radius increase, which is most visible on fast weapon swings and vehicle movement. The cost is a fullscreen post-process pass of 2–4% frame time. Competitive players universally disable motion blur as it obscures target outlines during rapid tracking; the FPS recovery is modest but the clarity improvement in fast engagements is meaningful.