Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Performance Review

ign.com:

Activision’s yearly festive treat is back. The IW engine, now in its ninth iteration, remains relatively static since the start of the current generation. There has been some regression on consoles at least, with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s ray traced shadows no longer present. The PC offers DLSS and FSR options, which are necessary, even on my RTX 3080, if you want to hit 4K/60fps on Extreme settings. All three consoles offer two performance modes: a high resolution 60fps mode and a reduced quality 120fps mode. The real difference between the modes are as follows.

Xbox Series X and PS5 are identical in their base 60Hz modes. They both output at a full 3840 x 2160 with identical settings, and this is reconstructed from a base of 1920 x 2160, as per the previous two games. Xbox Series S sports a close match, visually, aside from small reductions on textures, alpha effects, bloom and shadows, but the biggest reduction is resolution, with it targeting a 2560 x 1440 output and then scaling or reconstruction from a 1280 x 1440 base.

The 60fps mode on PS5 and Series X is boring from an analysis perspective but great from a gameplay one. In one of the heaviest levels at the start of the campaign, we get a locked and stable 60fps readout from both Series X and PS5. Even when swamped with post processing effects, alpha, enemies and multiple shadow-casting lights, we get no deviation from that flat line, with later levels backing this up. All versions likely run an adaptive V-sync that helps any moments that dip below the required 16ms frame time, ensuring it still feels as fluid as possible. The Xbox Series S is the only one that registered tearing in my testing, as it struggles to stay close to that 60fps target on some