Best Graphics Cards for Playing COD MW2 (2022) at 1080p

Introduction

The new Call of Duty MW2 Remastered (2022) has gone down a storm within the gaming community, with gamers rushing to pick up the latest Activision title. But with any new game comes new hardware requirements, recommend specs and support for technologies such as DLSS and Ray Tracing. Is your graphics card good enough to run the new COD MW2 Remastered, and if not, which GPUs are best? In this guide we’ll be covering off the best graphics cards to buy for playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered at 1080P while achieving high frame rates. This guide will include a range of graphics cards, suited to all budgets, with designs from both AMD and Nvidia.

When testing any new title, we look to match components with other balanced parts to ensure our testing remains fair. In aid of full transparency, we also record and upload all of our full benchmark runs to our benchmarking YouTube channel, ‘Benched! by GeekaWhat’.

During our testing of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, we benchmarked a number of both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs at 1080P, ranging from the RTX 3050 up to the RX 6750 XT and RTX 3070.

In a rather surprising fashion, AMD’s RX 6650 XT came out on top overall during testing and is our number one pick. Leaving its NVIDIA counterparts in the dust, the RX 6650 XT smoked the competition, only losing out to its bigger brother the RX 6750 XT in performance. Pulling in an average framerate of 191 Frames Per Second (FPS) the RX 6650 XT left little to be desired in the FPS department. Beating out the likes of NVIDIA’s RTX 3050, 60, 60Ti and even the RTX 3070 – yes you read that right – the RX 6650 XT more than earns the number one spot. For pure price to performance in Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare 2 at 1080P the RX 6650 XT is the clear standout performer, averaging roughly 30FPS+ more than the RTX 3060Ti whilst coming in at a similar MSRP, the results speak for themselves.

Even more impressive is that the RX 6650 XT beat out the RTX cards whilst having NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) enabled. There are promising signs for the future of AMD GPUs, with NVIDIA’s DLSS historically having been the go-to when looking at render scaling technologies. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) was a surprise package, allowing us to gain a significant performance increase without the cost of losing visual fidelity. Whilst support for FSR may be lacking in other titles, it certainly wasn’t in Modern Warfare 2, working perfectly and without issue during our testing.

The RX 6750 XT performed so well in fact at 1080P that we feel that it may actually be slightly wasted at times. The RX 6750 XT averaged over 220 FPS during our testing, leaving clear legroom to be tested at 1440P. The RX 6750 XT may be the go-to choice, however, if you’d like to play at true 1080P. By disabling FSR the RX 6750 XT is still more than capable of playing Modern Warfare 2 at a consistent frame rate whilst also regaining the visual fidelity lost to render upscaling.

Fear not Nvidia fans, we can in fact recommend an Nvidia GPU for Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare 2, the RTX 3060Ti – phew! Nvidia’s tried and tested RTX 3060Ti has long been somewhat of a pound for pound (or dollar for dollar) king when looking at price to performance. Bringing near RTX 3070 level performance at a considerably lower MSRP, the RTX 3060Ti sits in a great spot for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 at 1080P.

Coming in at $100 cheaper than the RTX 3070, the step up in performance provided by the RTX 3070 is much less noticeable than between the other GPU’s we tested and in our opinion makes the 3060Ti a much better choice. The RTX 3060Ti averaged 164 FPS in game compared to the 177 FPS achieved by the RTX 3070, a sizably smaller gap than the 30+ FPS improvement we witnessed between the RTX 3060Ti and RTX 3060.