Modern Warfare 4's PC Build Adds a New Mode, a 90 FPS Target, and a 115 GB Floor

Activision detailed the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 on September 29, 2026, in a post on the Call of Duty blog, along with a new PC trailer shot in ultrawide and HDR. The game launches Friday, October 23, 2026 on Battle.net and Steam and through the Xbox app on PC, and on consoles including the Nintendo Switch 2. The same post introduced Collateral, a new multiplayer mode, and published the hardware tiers Activision will support at launch.

Related reading: Modern Warfare 4 Campaign Draws 90% Positive Steam Reviews in Early Access · Valve's Cancelled Portal Prequel F-Stop Surfaces as a Playable Build.

Of everything shown so far, the PC announcement is the most complete look at what Modern Warfare 4 will actually ask of a machine. It covers three system-requirement tiers, a stated frame-rate target, driver versions, upscaling and ray-tracing support, and a set of security requirements that will decide which PCs can run the game at all.

The PC build is the most detailed look at the game yet

Beenox, the Call of Duty PC lead developer, worked with Infinity Ward on this version, per the blog post. Activision says the game ships with more than 800 customization options across graphics, gameplay, input devices and interface, and that it configures settings automatically from a machine's hardware. Displays from 1080p and 1440p up to 4K are covered, standard and ultrawide alike. Sub-frame mouse polling is listed as a feature; Activision says it sharpens aiming.

The three requirement tiers differ sharply, as GodIsAGeek and KhelNow both report, and as Activision's own support page sets out:

• Minimum: Windows 10 64-bit (latest update), an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel Core i5-6600, 8 GB of RAM and 3 GB of VRAM, with an AMD Radeon RX 470, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or 1060, or an Intel Arc A580.
• Recommended: Windows 11 64-bit (latest update), an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i7-8700K, 16 GB of RAM and 8 GB of VRAM, with an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, or an Intel Arc B580. Activision lists a 90 FPS target at this tier for multiplayer on High settings.
• Ultra, or 4K upscaled with high-quality ray tracing: Windows 11 64-bit, an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel Core i7-10700K, 32 GB of RAM and 16 GB of VRAM, with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT or an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

All three tiers need 115 GB of SSD storage, broadband internet, a DirectX-compatible sound card and DirectX 12. Activision says the figures hold for launch and may change.

Activision lists recommended driver versions of AMD 26.7.1, Nvidia 616.56 and Intel 32.0.101.8974, and says Nvidia will ship an Advanced Shader Delivery-compatible driver on October 21. That feature, formerly called Shader Preloading, delivers precompiled shaders ahead of time. Activision advises installing the Xbox PC app before launch on any PC platform, because the app is what pulls shaders in at install and through updates; it is not needed otherwise. Booting the game no longer triggers a restart for updates, though a restart is still expected if an update lands during play between matches. Menus were trimmed to reach a match faster.

Collateral bets on a different kind of multiplayer player

The new mode is aimed at Search and Destroy players and the competitive crowd, and Activision's framing from August is blunt about the intent. The Call of Duty: NEXT recap called the mode "single-life and high stakes," per Worthplaying.

In Collateral, teams swap between attacking and defending two bomb sites. Every player opens with a pistol, earns cash through eliminations and objective play, and spends it on upgrades between rounds. Dying costs a player their loadout; the money they earned carries over. Respawns, killstreaks, automatic health regeneration and custom loadouts are all switched off.

The buy structure splits into three parts. Armor and Perks include Armor Vest, Battle Hardened, Lethal Reach, Fast Hands and Ghost. Equipment includes the Flash Grenade, Molotov, Frag Grenade, Stim, Smoke Wall and Riot Shield. A Team Buy option is a UAV.

That is a recognizable template. Valve's Counter-Strike has run on a round-based economy for more than two decades, and Valorant built its own version of the idea into a mainstream shooter. Call of Duty has spent years on the opposite design: fast respawns, killstreak rewards, loadouts carried across a whole match. Collateral strips those out and makes each round a small resource decision. Whether the audience Call of Duty actually has wants that is the open question.

A 115 GB floor and TPM 2.0 narrow the door

The storage number deserves a second look. All three tiers list 115 GB of SSD storage, and the minimum tier is only 3 GB of VRAM. A PC that clears the minimum spec still needs a solid-state drive with room to spare. Hard-drive installs are effectively excluded, and so are older machines already loaded with several large games. Call of Duty's installs have been among the largest in the industry for years, and 115 GB for launch is not an outlier so much as a continuation.

The security requirements are the sharper filter. Playing on PC requires TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, and Activision says further security measures may be enforced. Intel Arc GPUs also need Resizable Bar. For now, only Intel and AMD processors with the AVX instruction set work with the game. That last line matters to holdouts running pre-2011 CPUs, and the "for now" leaves room for it to change.

Activision pairs those requirements with RICOCHET Anti-Cheat, which it describes in layers: server-side detections, hardware-based protections, deep investigations, and legal action against the cheating market. Two-factor authentication and email verification are offered as extra account security. Tying the game to TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot is a common anti-cheat tactic, since it raises the cost of running modified hardware and unsigned boot code. It also excludes some dual-boot setups and older motherboards whose firmware does not expose a Trusted Platform Module, and it will lock out players who have not enabled Secure Boot in BIOS.

Gunplay and image quality change too

The shooting model changes in a way that experienced players will feel. Earlier Call of Duty games sent bullets to random points inside an area of effect. Modern Warfare 4 fires them from the weapon's barrel position in both ADS and hipfire, and an optional Laser Attachment shows where shots travel. Depth of Field, previously a single control, splits into World and Weapon settings.

Ray tracing works in Campaign, Multiplayer and DMZ. Upscaling options include Nvidia DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR "Redstone" and Intel XeSS 3. Filmic SMAA T2X is the default post-process anti-aliasing. A built-in Benchmark Tool runs a simulated multiplayer sequence and reports average FPS, CPU and GPU load, ping and input latency, with per-zone breakdowns and setting suggestions. Enhanced FOV is PC-exclusive, and HDR10+ reads a screen's brightness in real time.

Most of that is standard modern PC-shooter surface area, but the benchmark tool and per-zone breakdowns are the kind of thing that usually arrives later, if at all. Putting them in at launch gives reviewers and players a shared way to check Activision's own 90 FPS claim.

Caveats

The numbers above are Activision's, published before launch. The 90 FPS target at recommended specs applies to multiplayer on High settings, and it is a target, not an independent measurement; third-party frame tests will not exist until the game ships. Activision says the system requirements hold for launch and may change afterward, which leaves room for a patch to move them. The AVX restriction is similarly time-bound in the publisher's own wording.

The 115 GB figure is installation size, not download size, and Call of Duty installs have historically grown with seasonal content, though Activision has not said what the footprint looks like after launch. Collateral's details come from the PC announcement and August's NEXT material, so how the mode is tuned, how many maps it ships with and whether it gets a ranked playlist are not yet public. Nothing here changes the consoles' position: the version question for this article is the PC build, and the console editions are unaffected by the TPM requirement.

What to watch

Two things will settle whether this launch lands as intended. The first is Collateral's reception. Activision has tied the mode to the competitive audience, and that audience is the hardest to move off Counter-Strike and Valorant; if the mode does not find a ranked home and a stable player base within the first weeks, it becomes another limited-time experiment.

The second is whether the 90 FPS target holds. Recommended-tier hardware like an RTX 3060 Ti running multiplayer at High settings is a specific, checkable claim, and the built-in benchmark makes it easy to compare. Early adopter reports will test it long before any official patch notes.

There is also the shader question. Advanced Shader Delivery is meant to end the first-match stutter that has dogged recent Call of Duty PC launches, and it depends on the Xbox PC app being installed before the game. If that dependency surprises players on Battle.net or Steam, the fix will be a support thread rather than a settings toggle.

Modern Warfare 4 is set in a rapidly escalating global conflict centered on the Korean Peninsula, per Worthplaying. PC pre-orders carry the Hunter Killer Operator Skin and the Gilded Pearl Camo Pack. The Vault Edition adds the Hostile Alliance and Special Forces Operator Packs, the Signature Weapon Collection, one season of BlackCell and a DMZ Deployment Bonus. Launch is less than four weeks out.

Cover: A Call of Duty Warzone arena at the Esports World Cup 2026. Photo by Eric Salard via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.