Modern Warfare 2 benchmarks surprisingly well on PC

If you’ve played PC games long enough, you’re no doubt familiar with how rare it is to see half-decent benchmarks in PC games. A lot of times people figure out their own stress run and report everything manually.

A lot of PC games do include benchmarks, though it looks like it’s just to check a box and rule it out – but not Modern Warfare 2.

Modern Warfare 2’s servers are everywhere now, including on PC, and one of the few surprises PC players see (besides the lack of cross-game switching) is a benchmark.

On the one hand, it’s surprising that Infinity Ward didn’t communicate its existence before launch, but also because Call of Duty is one of the more optimized PC games today, its popularity means targeting different system configurations There are tons of tests.

Benchmarks can be found in the multiplayer line, which is a bit unusual for it. Scroll past all the other tiles and you’ll find it at the end of the line.

Once launched, the benchmark will run for a little over a minute, playing different heavy effects scenes. While it’s running, you’ll be able to track average FPS, CPU render time, and GPU render time and temperature.

All of this is fairly standard, but the results screen is where things get interesting.

As you can see, you not only get stats for the average frame rate, but also a breakdown of the 1% and 5% lows. To summarize further, all three results are reviewed again, showing both GPU and CPU frame rates, respectively.

This is a great way to see which of these two components has the most impact on your frame rate. In my case, the game is GPU bound, which means I need to upgrade my GPU to achieve higher frame rates.

Playing at lower resolutions changes this dynamic and puts you into CPU-bound situations more often.

The right panel displays some other useful information about the system, including RAM and VRAM usage, and the actual rendering resolution for your chosen upscaling method.

While it’s not as exhaustive as the Gears 5 benchmark, it’s still very useful. Give it a try and share your results.

If Modern Warfare 2 works well for you, it’s best to learn the fastest way to level up and upgrade your weapons.