Modern Warfare 4 System Requirements (2026): 3 GPU Tiers

A current 16 GB mid-range graphics card clears Modern Warfare 4 at 1080p high refresh and at 1440p high. You step up only if you want ray tracing on at 1440p ultra, you drive a 4K panel, or the same machine does creative work. That is the verdict.

One caveat before any of it. Activision has not published a PC system-requirements sheet for MW4, and launch is October 23, 2026. The only PC requirement the company has confirmed is a security one: TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. Every hardware figure below is a projection anchored to the Call of Duty engine shipping today, and it gets replaced the day the official sheet lands.

At a glance

Is a mid-range card enough for Modern Warfare 4?

Short answer, yes, for most of the ways people play Call of Duty. The step-up cases are specific and small. If you play at 1080p on a high-refresh panel, the limiting part is more likely to be your processor than your graphics card, which is the same pattern our esports GPU picks at 1080p 144Hz piece runs into.

What Activision has actually confirmed

Here is the state of it as of early August 2026. Activision's official MW4 page carries one PC requirement, and it is not a graphics card. The footnote reads: TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot required for PC, other security measures may be enforced. There is no CPU listed, no GPU tier, no memory figure, no install size.

So the table below is ours, not theirs. The GPU, VRAM, RAM and storage rows are projections anchored to the shipping Call of Duty engine and to what the last two Call of Duty installs weighed on disk. The security row is the only line in it that comes from Activision. If you want the broader framework for matching a card to a panel rather than to one game, our guide on how to choose a GPU and a monitor that matches covers it.

The TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot gate

This is the requirement most likely to stop a perfectly capable gaming PC from launching the game, and it is the one nobody is treating as a buying consideration.

Two things have to be true. Your machine needs a TPM 2.0 module, which on any AMD or Intel platform from the last decade means the firmware TPM baked into the chipset rather than a physical add-in header. And Windows has to be booting with Secure Boot on, which means booting in UEFI mode rather than legacy.

The problem is that a machine built before roughly 2021 very often ships with both switched off. Board vendors shipped AMD fTPM and Intel PTT disabled by default, and they shipped the Compatibility Support Module enabled so older boot media would work. Nothing about that configuration hurts anything until a game refuses to launch.

Check it before you buy hardware. Press Win+R, run tpm.msc, and look for a TPM 2.0 device reporting as ready. Then run msinfo32 and read two lines: BIOS Mode should say UEFI, and Secure Boot State should say On. If both read correctly you are done, and nothing below applies to you.

If they do not, the order of operations matters more than the individual steps. Enable fTPM in BIOS on an AMD board, or PTT on an Intel one. Then disable CSM. Then enable Secure Boot. Reboot between the last two.

Here is the trap that will cost you an evening. If Windows was installed with CSM enabled, it is sitting on an MBR partition table. Turning Secure Boot on without converting that disk first leaves the machine refusing to boot, and the fix at that point is a recovery drive. Microsoft ships mbr2gpt for exactly this. It converts a system disk from MBR to GPT in place, without touching data, and it has to run while CSM is still enabled. Convert first, then flip the firmware settings. Doing it in the other order is how people end up reinstalling Windows over a game requirement.

Platform coverage is uneven. AM5 and LGA1851 boards ship with everything present and usually enabled. AM4 boards on the 300 and 400 series chipsets frequently need a BIOS update before fTPM appears in the menu at all, and some early Intel 8th through 10th generation boards hide PTT under a vendor-specific submenu with a different name. Read your board's manual rather than guessing at it.

If your platform cannot expose TPM 2.0 at any BIOS version, that is not a settings problem. That is a platform replacement, and the processor section further down is where that conversation starts.

Benchmarks

MW4 has no benchmarks because MW4 has not shipped. What exists is Black Ops 6, running on the engine MW4 is built on, and that is the closest honest yardstick anyone has right now. The numbers below are native, at ultra, with upscaling and frame generation off. Read them as the shape of the ladder rather than as MW4 predictions. Our Black Ops 6 GPU testing goes deeper on the settings side.

One row in each chart is an RTX 5080. It sits there as a ceiling reference so you can see where the curve flattens, not as a recommendation.

Enough for 1080p high refresh: Sapphire Pulse RX 9060 XT

Sapphire Technology Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC, 16GB Dual HDMI-DP

$499.95

Buy the Sapphire Pulse RX 9060 XT on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

On the shipping Call of Duty build this card averages 113 fps at 1080p with the settings maxed, and 77 fps at 1440p ultra. Those are native numbers. No upscaling, no frame generation. For a 1080p 144Hz panel that is headroom rather than a target you are scraping at.

The 16 GB frame buffer is why it is here instead of something cheaper. Call of Duty ships a texture pool that grows across a two-year live-service run, and 8 GB cards are the ones that start swapping first. We went through the numbers on whether 8 GB of VRAM is still enough, and the short version is that it is not, at any price, for a game you intend to play for years.

RDNA 4 also lands well in this engine specifically. Reviewers measured the 9060 XT roughly 32 percent ahead of the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB in Black Ops 6, a wider gap than the two cards show across a broad game average.

What you give up

Ray tracing outside Call of Duty. Turn on heavy RT in a Cyberpunk-class title and the Nvidia side of the shelf pulls away. FSR 4 has closed most of the upscaling gap at Quality, but Performance mode still shows its work in fast camera motion, which is the exact condition a shooter puts it in.

The 128-bit memory bus caps what this card does at 4K. It is a 1080p card that reaches into 1440p, not a 1440p card with room to spare. And if the same machine renders in Blender or runs Stable Diffusion, the missing CUDA support is a real cost.

One buying note. An 8 GB version of this card exists under a listing name that reads almost identically. Buyers have flagged the confusion. Check the capacity in the title before you order.

Who it's for

The 1080p player on a 144Hz to 240Hz panel who wants max settings and does not want to revisit the VRAM question for three years. If you are shopping that resolution more broadly, our 1080p picks by refresh tier cover the rest of the shelf.

The recommended tier: Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT

Sapphire 11348-03-20G Pulse AMD Radeon™ RX 9070 XT Gaming Graphics Card with 16GB GDDR6, AMD RDNA 4

$789.99

Buy the Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

At 1440p ultra the 9070 XT lands near 121 fps in Black Ops 6. That is the number that makes a 165Hz panel feel settled rather than negotiated. You are not trading texture quality against frame rate at that resolution. You set it once and stop thinking about it.

Call of Duty is a raster-first engine, and raster is where RDNA 4 is strongest. The 9070 XT beats the RTX 5070 outright in raster and trades blows with cards a tier above it, while carrying 16 GB on a 256-bit bus instead of 12 GB on a narrower one. For a game you play at high refresh, that trade lands the right way.

If you are cross-shopping the whole tier rather than just this one game, our 1440p GPU picks by tier lay out the alternatives.

What you give up

Ray tracing, again. On the maps that lean on RT reflections, Nvidia's hardware pulls ahead and DLSS 4 pulls further. FSR 4 is good now in a way FSR 3 never was, but the gap has not closed to zero.

Then there is the SKU trap. Sapphire sells a Pulse and a Nitro+ under listing titles that differ by a few words, at different prices, and the part number is the only reliable way to tell them apart at a glance. The Pulse is 11348-03-20G. Buyers have flagged ordering the wrong one often enough that it is worth checking twice.

Who it's for

The 1440p 165Hz player who wants native frames without shopping the top of the shelf, and who plays Call of Duty more than they play ray-traced single-player titles.

The step-up: ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC

ASUS TUF Gaming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition Graphics Card, (PCIe 5.0, HDMI/DP 2.1, 3.125-Slot, Military-Grade Components, Protective PCB Coating), 3 Year Warranty

$1,216.20$1,289.99

Buy the ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

Roughly 126 fps at 1440p ultra and 73 fps at 4K ultra on the shipping build. The 4K figure is the one that matters, because 4K is where the tier below stops being an answer.

DLSS 4's transformer model is the other half of the case. At 1440p and above, Quality mode is hard to separate from native, and in a fast shooter that is a genuine setting rather than a compromise. If the same machine streams, NVENC AV1 is a second reason to sit on this side of the shelf.

What you give up

Money you may not see returned. For a competitive player at 1440p who keeps ray tracing off and cares about input latency, most of the gap over the tier below goes unused. This is a resolution and feature purchase, not a Call of Duty purchase.

It is a 3.125-slot card. Measure the case, count the exposed PCIe slots on the back panel, and confirm front-to-back clearance before ordering. Buyers have flagged this one on mid-tower builds that looked fine on paper.

And 16 GB is the right amount today, not a permanent 4K buffer.

Who it's for

The reader who plays campaign and Warzone at 1440p ultra with ray tracing on, drives a 4K panel, streams, or runs CUDA work on the same box. If none of those four describe you, the tier below is the better buy.

The CPU side: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

AMD RYZEN 7 9800X3D 8-Core, 16-Thread Desktop Processor

$414.99$479.00

Buy the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

Call of Duty multiplayer is a processor load before it is a graphics load. Average frame rate is what a graphics card buys you. The 1% lows in a full lobby, with a dozen players in view and a killcam about to fire, are what the processor buys you. The 9800X3D carries 96 MB of L3 cache, and a cache-sensitive shooter is exactly the workload that turns cache into frames.

AM5 is a live socket, so the board outlives the chip. And every AM5 board exposes AMD fTPM, which means the security gate above is a BIOS toggle rather than a hardware problem.

What you give up

Relevance, if your monitor tops out at 1080p 144Hz. A Ryzen 5 class chip clears that target and the difference belongs in the graphics card instead. Pairing this processor with an 8 GB card is the most common way to build a machine that runs slower than its parts list reads.

There is no cooler in the box either. Budget for one.

Who it's for

Players on 240Hz and faster panels, and anyone whose 1% lows already collapse in Warzone on their current chip. If you are building the display side at the same time, our 1080p 240Hz monitors piece covers the panels.

Bottom line

If you play at 1080p on a high-refresh panel, buy the Sapphire Pulse RX 9060 XT and stop there. If you play at 1440p and want native frames at high refresh, the Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT is the tier to buy. If you run ray tracing at 1440p ultra, drive a 4K panel, or stream and render on the same box, step up to the ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC. If your monitor is 240Hz or faster, spend on the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D before you spend on the graphics card.

And before you buy any of it, go run tpm.msc, because that is the one requirement Activision has confirmed. The peripherals side is its own question, and our mouse and controller picks for Call of Duty covers it.

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