PC Gamer's latest hardware sweep is a full pass over Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's graphics menu — every toggle, every preset, every option that promises a prettier war while quietly billing your frame rate for it. The verdict: four settings carry the load. The rest is mostly decoration.

That's less a knock on the game than a fact of life for PC shooters. Settings menus have swollen into cockpits, and the gap between medium and ultra on half of them is a shadow you will never notice while sliding around a corner with a smoke grenade going off. The piece's framing is blunt about it: skip the busywork, tune the handful that actually move the needle.

Upscaling gets a specific nod — the article notes it "can also help a bunch" — which tracks with how most Modern Warfare players already run things. Whether you're on DLSS, FSR or whichever frame-generation flavor is current, the upscaler is usually the biggest lever available without touching geometry, textures or lighting. It's also the one most likely to leave your game looking slightly smeared if you cram it into a performance preset on a 1080p panel.

The timing isn't random. GamesIndustry.biz reports that Activision has a lot riding on Modern Warfare 4 after Black Ops 7 landed badly with critics and players, with third-party tracking suggesting it significantly underperformed compared to other entries in the series. When a publisher needs a win, a clean, well-behaved PC build is inexpensive goodwill — and a shortlist of four sliders to touch is cheaper still.

Separately, Xbox has been repurposing players' custom dynamic dashboard backgrounds as Modern Warfare 4 advertising. That's a different kind of settings problem, and one you can't fix with a benchmark run.

The four settings in question are broken down in full in the original article. If you've been putting off a performance pass because the menu looks like a jet cockpit, consider this your excuse.