AMD Radeon GPUs are best for max MW3 fps, says early testing

Testing from Computer Base suggests Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 prefers AMD Radeon graphics cards, much like previous CoD games.

AMD Radeon GPUs max MW3 fps Call of Duty: a slightly smiling man with curly, black hair looks into the camera while the text 'AMD RADEON' appears in the top right.
PCGamesN

Published:

AMD Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 PC games hardware 

You’re better off with an AMD Radeon GPU if you want to boost MW3 fps, according to testing carried out by German site, Computer Base. Of course, it’s no great surprise that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 follows in the footsteps of previous CoD games in preferring AMD graphics cards, but it’s good news for team red nonetheless.

YouTube Thumbnail

Gamers will be flocking to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 now the MW3 release date has arrived, despite negative reaction to the four-hour CoD MW3 campaign. The FPS behemoth never fails to attract an enormous player base, so the news that team red hardware performs better in MW3 will likely be pounced on for use in marketing materials.

The fresh data comes from Computer Base, whose team must have worked fast to get this evaluation done in time for release day. The testing concludes that “AMD graphics cards are significantly faster in CoD: Modern Warfare III than the competing Nvidia models.”

AMD Radeon GPU MW3 fps: a graph showing the average frame rate of different GPUs in MW3.

Duking it out at the top are the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX — which is an impressive 34 percent more powerful than its usual counterpart, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 — and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. Remarkably, the RX 7900 XTX is ahead on average fps in 1080 and 1440p resolutions, only falling behind at 4K.

Team red performs well across the board. In Computer Base’s words, translated from the original German by Google, “The Radeon RX 7800 XT clearly defeats the GeForce RTX 4070, while the Radeon RX 6800 XT easily leaves the GeForce RTX 3080 behind. Likewise, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is no match for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and the Radeon RX 6650 XT literally plays with the GeForce RTX 3060 and instead takes on the GeForce RTX 3070.” Brutal.

What makes this even more impressive is that this data was captured with Nvidia DLSS 3 Frame Generation enabled. This proprietary upscaling tech, which only works with RTX 4000-series GPUs, is usually Nvidia’s ace in the hole when it comes to frame rate.

If you’re planning to dive straight into the MW3 servers now the release date is upon us, don’t go unprepared. Check out our guides to MW3 guns and MW3 loadouts to give you the edge on the battlefield.

Inspired by the steep South Pennine hills he calls home, Dylan’s a tech maximalist with one motto: the bigger, the better. As such, his interests lie in whatever AMD and Nvidia are cooking up. That said, he's happiest in front of a turn-based strategy or medieval fantasy game on a big screen, with rescue cat Minnie on his lap, and a pint of bitter in hand.