Modern Warfare 2 has a surprisingly good benchmark on PC

If you’ve been playing PC games for long enough, you’ll no doubt be familiar with how rare it is to see a half-decent benchmark test in a PC game. Often times, people come up with their own stress runs and report everything manually.

Plenty of PC games do include benchmarks, though seemingly just to check a box and get it out of the way – but not Modern Warfare 2.

Modern Warfare 2’s servers are now online everywhere, including on PC, and one of the few surprises PC players saw (other than the lack of a cross-play toggle) was a benchmark.

For one, it’s surprising because Infinity Ward did not communicate its existence ahead of launch, but also because Call of Duty is one of the better-optimised PC games these days, and its popularity means there’s plenty of tests out there for different system configurations.

The benchmark can be found in the Multiplayer row, which is a bit of an unusual placement for it. Scroll past all the other tiles and you’ll find it at the end of the row.

Once launched, the benchmark will run for a little over a minute, playing different effects-heavy scenarios. As it’s running, you’ll be able to track average FPS, CPU render time, as well as GPU render time and temperature.

All of that is fairly standard, but the results screen is where things get interesting.

As you can see, not only do you get a tally of the average framerate, it’s broken down by 1% and 5% lows. The summary dives even deeper, recapping all three results again while showing GPU and CPU framerate separately.

This is a fantastic way to see which of the two components is affecting your framerate the most. In my case, the game is GPU-bound, meaning I would need to upgrade my GPU to reach higher framerates.

Playing on lower resolutions will change that dynamic, and get you into CPU-bounded situations more often.

The right-side panel displays a few other useful bits of information about your system, including RAM and VRAM usage, as well as the actual render resolution for your chosen upscaling method.