by The Right Hardware for Call of Duty Warzone and Modern Warfare 3: PCGH performed multiple graphics card and processor benchmarks to clarify which GPUs and CPUs enable smooth shooting. Officially available since November 10, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is once again a collaboration between several Activision studios and offers, among other things, a new single-player campaign, this time developed by Sledgehammer Games. The story picks up the story of predecessors created by Infinity Ward, but offers a fresh approach with a new, familiar villain, so prior knowledge isn’t really necessary.
In addition to multiplayer mode contributed by Raven Software and a new edition of popular maps, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 also offers a zombie mode contributed by Treyarch, for the first time in Modern Warfare history. Owners of the Vault Edition (cost 99.99 euros) can join the campaign from November 2nd. The regular edition or Modern Warfare 3 campaign is available for 69.99 euros. If you’ve already invested time and/or money into skins and operators in Modern Warfare 2, you can transfer them to Modern Warfare 3.
There are several rumors and controversies surrounding the origins of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. Essentially, it is a contribution from the world famous Media journalist Jason Schreier or rumors that a complete, full-price Call of Duty is not expected to appear until 2024. Only an add-on or expansion for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is planned for 2023. There are reports for and against this theory, which we will not delve into here due to lack of valid information. Be that as it may, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is marketed as a full-price product, so it should be classified as such.
In addition to early access, the Vault Edition of Call of Duty MW3, which costs 100 euros, also includes the Battlepass. Content is transferable to Warzone. However, the pass can be upgraded again for 29.99 euros, which we found out from the extremely prominent location of the store: We almost bought the content by mistake…
Source: PC Gaming Hardware
In CoD Modern Warfare 3 (2023) you experience events from the perspective of several veterans of the series; Dear colleagues from previous parts are back on board. Modern Warfare plays as fast as usual, the gunplay is fast, uncomplicated and satisfying. The campaign’s story, including interspersed flashbacks and perspective shifts, takes you halfway around the world and to fictional areas known from previous parts of MW, such as Verdansk or Urzikstan. Despite many similarities to its predecessors, the campaign is very different from previous Call of Duty titles: the new Modern Warfare 3 intersperses relatively open-ended “sandbox” levels between familiar, linearly designed and elaborately staged missions that strongly resemble maps of Warzone with AI Opponents. This type of campaign and mission design is not well received by everyone; The basic tenor of the Modern Warfare 3 campaign is devastating. However, many PCGH editors had a lot of fun with the new approach, as the open design brings a playful freedom not known in Call of Duty. You can attack opponents head-on in the classic way, or alternatively, flank the bad guys, run them over with a stationary vehicle, shoot them from a safe distance with a sniper rifle or a drone – the options are great, just not the classic Call of Duty. If you want to know more about the gameplay, we recommend checking out our sister magazine PC Games.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 – graphics and performance
Instead, we want to focus on technology and performance. 2023’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 uses IW Engine 9, which was first used in the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot and also its direct successor. Not much has changed technically, the only difference is in the support for certain features. Modern Warfare 2019 included support for ray tracing shadows and DLSS upsampling for the first time. Modern Warfare 2 ditched the expensive gloss, but offered additional support for FSR 1 and Intel’s XeSS. In Modern Warfare 3, the big technical innovation is support for Nvidia’s Frame Generation (DLSS 3.0), which we have obviously already seen. The system requirements are identical to the predecessors, so not much technical progress is expected:
| Modern Warfare (2019) | Modern Warfare 2 (2022) | Modern Warfare 3 (2023) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum | |||
| windows | Windows 10 x64 | Windows 10 x64 | Windows 10 x64 |
| CPU | Intel Core i3-6100 / Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 | Intel Core i3-6100 / Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 | Intel Core i3-6100 / Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 |
| TO KNOCK. | 8 gigabytes of RAM | 8 gigabytes of RAM | 8 gigabytes of RAM |
| graphics card | Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon 470 | Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon 470 | Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon 470 |
| hard drive | 125 GiBytes of available storage space | 125 GiBytes of available storage space | 125 GiBytes of available storage space |
| API | DirectX12 | DirectX12 | DirectX12 |
| Recommended | |||
| windows | Windows 10 or 11 x64 | Windows 10 or 11 x64 | Windows 10 or 11 x64 |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-6600K / Core i7-4770 or Ryzen 5 1400 | Intel Core i5-6600K / Core i7-4770 or Ryzen 5 1400 | Intel Core i5-6600K / Core i7-4770 or Ryzen 5 1400 |
| TO KNOCK. | 12 Gibytes of RAM | 12 Gibytes of RAM | 12 Gibytes of RAM |
| graphics card | Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580 | Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580 | Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580 or Intel Arc A770 |
| hard drive | 125 GiBytes of available storage space | 125 GiBytes of available storage space | 125 GiBytes of available storage space |
| API | DirectX12 | DirectX12 | DirectX12 |
Upon launching the game, you are greeted by the familiar Modern Warfare 2 user interface, including the unrivaled extensive options menu. Here you can not just adjust the usual graphics options, enable DLSS, etc. or increase image sharpness. You can also adjust controls, field of view (FoV), and interface, configure effects like film grain and motion blur, or change multiplayer settings, as they now apply to Modern Warfare 3 and its predecessor, as well as Warzone.
Call of Duty – The options menu
Graphically, Modern Warfare 3 (2023) offers the quality we’ve been used to since 2019 – without the ray-traced shadows. As in its predecessors, the faces of the protagonists and their adversaries are particularly impressive, the digitized actors act very convincingly and show a variety of details and animations. Unfortunately, this really attractive aspect of graphical presentation often only comes into play in pre-rendered and compressed scenes; Stylish real-time sequences are few and far between in Modern Warfare 3.
The presentation of the environments and the character animations create an ambivalent image. In the linear missions, which are based on previous parts of the series, these are at the usual high level. However, in the open “Open Combat Missions”, which resemble Warzone, the graphical presentation drops drastically. Characters don’t move through environments in the usual smooth, elaborately animated way, but tend to move through open areas in jerks. The quality of assets here is also noticeably lower than in the narrow but detailed corridors typical of series production. Texture resolution and level of detail often look a little dated; pixel wallpapers are often cloudy or marred by strong compression artifacts.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3: graphic examples
We really miss the big, explosive scenarios that Call of Duty is famous for. Here and there a bit of the previous bombast shines through: when we go hunting for terrorists in a football stadium and hordes of fans in their colorful shirts run around in panic, it feels darkly similar to Modern Warfare 2 and the “No Russian” mission. this was shocking at the time. Remember if. However, this mission ends so abruptly and unspectacularly that we wonder if the developers ran out of money for explosions – or if the development time was simply too short. There are some interesting approaches to stealth and infiltration that create some tension visually and in terms of gameplay, but the AI becomes overwhelmed by the large open areas, often stands still stupidly, or appears to be marked by collective blindness and deafness. Now let’s move on to performance, because there are mostly good things to report here.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 image gallery in testing: Radeon dominance meets Nvidia frame generation
