The 2019 remastered version of CoD: Modern Warfare is a blast not only thanks to it’s tense single player campaign, but also the extensive and broadly enjoyed multiplayer – hyped by the outstanding and continuously extended «Warzone» battle royale mode.
It also has cross-play – allowing players all over the world to compete against players on a different platform, like PC vs PS4 vs Xbox.
MW configurations for graphics and performance on an iMac with Boot Camp Windows
Adding now into the cross-game: a Mac!
Of course CoD: MW cannot actually be played on an Apple Mac under macOS – but thanks to Apple’s Boot Camp and natively running Windows on Mac through it, you can easily join your friends for fast paced online sessions.
Once the free-to-play CoD MW multiplayer has been installed through Battle.Net, launch it and head to the in-game «Options» screen.
Display settings
First and most important changes are in the section «Display» options. Here I was totally surprised by strange in-game recommendations, such as “keep native screen resolution and scale it down using the virtual «Renderer Resolution»“.
| Setting | Value | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Display Mode | Fullscreen | This will give you added FPS compared as with the default “Fullscreen borderless” |
| Display Monitor | iMac | |
| Display Adapter | Radeon Pro 580 | |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 60 | |
| Render Resolution | 100 | Important! Set this to 100% (don’t follow the game’s recommendation) |
| — Display Resolution | 2560 x 1440 | Most important! Don’t use native 5K resolution as recommended by the game – scale this down. |
| Aspect Ratio | Automatic | |
| Sync Every Frame (V-Sync) | Disabled | You don’t want this in games anyway |
| Custom Framerate Limit | Unlimited | As high FPS as possible, of course 🙂 |
| Display Gamma | 2.2 (sRGB) |
Details & Textures
With the «Details & Textures» settings you should play around a bit by observing the impacts on the VRAM indicator gauge. The following configs I find very suitable by leveraging constant, 60 FPS:
| Setting | Value | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Texture Resolution | High | …or save some VRAM on “Normal” |
| Texture Filter Anisotropic | High | |
| Particle Quality | High | |
| Bullet Impacts & Sprays | Enabled | |
| Tessellation | All | |
| On-demand Texture Streaming | Enabled | |
| Streaming Quality | Normal |
Shadow & Lighting
Light and shadow renderings are in every game a driver for required resources. I chose a somewhat balanced configuration giving great visual results nonetheless.
| Setting | Value | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Shadow Map Resolution | Normal | |
| Cache Spot Shadows | Enabled | Caching is good to reduce on-demand performance impacts |
| Cache Sun Shadows | Enabled | |
| Particle Lightning | Normal | |
| DirectX Raytracing | n/a | This is most likely disabled on the given iMac 5K hardware |
| Ambient Occlusion | Disabled | |
| Screen Space Reflection (SSR) | Low |
Post Processing Effects
In «Post Processing» you can pretty up the graphics visually. However, some of them are usually first things that gamers in any fast paced game turn off (like «Motion Blur») – they also have a huge impact on the required resources to be processed by your graphics card. Nice-to-haves so to speak.
| Setting | Value | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Anti-Aliasing | Filmic SMAA T2X | Important to make graphics much more pretty |
| Depth of Field | Disabled | |
| Filmic Strength | 1.00 | |
| World Motion Blur | Disabled | Gamers usually disable Motion Blur for less distraction from the relevant gameplay |
| Weapon Motion Blur | Disabled | Same, Motion Blur distracts too much |
| Film Grain | 0.00 | Makes the game graphics crisp and clear |
Fixes for some graphical artefacts that may occur in CoD: MW
Update the Apple Windows drivers, Radeon Pro application and graphics drivers
In the system tray (bottom right) you will find the Radeon Pro application – make sure to open it to check if there are any updates for your graphics card.
Also make sure to start the Boot Camp application under Windows (also in the system tray) and check for new software in the Apple software update center.
Graphics are suddenly worse / slow / changed
It seems that sometimes, especially after an automatic Shader Update or other Game updates, some of the graphics settings under «Options» are reverted or changed.
Therefore I recommend after each Modern Warfare game update to double check your graphics settings.
Performance boost with a warmed up graphics card
“Warm-up” your graphic card before playing the game. For example by watching a 4K video on YouTube for a few minutes.
Stuttering/lagging graphics in-game
Click the Windows key (Command key on a Mac keyboard) to quickly change back to the Windows OS – and then head back into the game, to fix stuttering graphics.
Additional articles
Here are additional resources on the ideal performance tuning for Call of Duty Modern Warfare:
- GameSpot «Best Settings For CoD: Modern Warfare 2 And Warzone»
- /r/AMDHelp «iMac Radeon Pro 580 stuttering on CoD Warzone»
Thank you for this!!
I can’t even get 60 fps with this anymore. How’s yours holding up
@Aki I learned about and using now the custom AMD drivers from BootCampDrivers.com (Red «Adrenalin» Edition) – this gives me again and usually at least close to 60 FPS in Warzone!