As any player of Call of Duty will tell you, there is enormous value in ensuring that you have the best settings for MW2 before engaging in the heat of battle. Optimising your setup can make the difference between victory and defeat.
Today, we'll be taking a look at the best settings for Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox Series X, so that all you Xbox players can give yourselves the best chance of victory. While we're at it, check out our guide to Modern Warfare 2 lag - this is another factor that can drastically influence your odds of winning.
If you're ready to supercharge your set-up, let's get going.
Best settings for MW2 on Xbox Series X (2023)
It's worth pointing out at the start, that there will always be an element of personal preference in all of these recommendations. So while we offer some suggestions, don't feel that you have to stick rigidly to what we say. Heck, nobody else does.
Instead, view these as a starting point, and then experiment with what feels best to you. What works perfectly for one person may not be as effective for another. But what we are proposing are settings that work pretty well for a large number of players.
Now that we've got all those caveats out of the way, here's the important stuff.
Best graphics settings
Starting with the graphics, our recommendations are as follows:
- Turn off Weapon Motion Blur and World Morion Blur. Both of these settings are intended to offer a visual flourish to the game, but don't add anything in terms of benefits to your gameplay. And in fact, by blurring what you can see, these can actually have a negative impact.
- Turn off On-Demand Texture Streaming. Once again, this feature is intended to improve the look of the game. But using it requires bandwidth, which may then reduce performance in other, more important ways, such as increasing lag.
- Set Film Grain to 0. By now, you'll be sensing a theme. Film Grain is about adding "noise" to what you can see. Removing this will keep things as sharp as possible.
- Turn off Depth of Field to keep everything in focus.
- Turn on FidelityFX CAS - this will help to make the game as sharp and detailed as possible.
- Finally, set your field of view to somewhere between 100 and 100. This one is very much about personal preference, but this is still higher than the default setting of 80. Some players may prefer to go below 100, others may want to go above 110. But 100-110 seems to be the Goldilocks zone for most players.
Best audio settings
Again, the best audio settings for MW2 will depend on personal preference, and possibly also what your set-up is, for example, are you wearing headphones, or maybe using a surround sound system. But we'd suggest the following as a starting point:
- Turn the music volume down. Some may like a little bit of ambient music, others may want to turn it off altogether, so they can hear everything that actually matters. So by all means turn it to 0 if you want. Otherwise, somewhere between 30 and 50 seems to be a sweet spot.
- In terms of other audio settings, you'll probably want to have your Master Volume, Effects Volume and Hit Marker Volume all turned up to 100 (or close to 100).
- Finally, Dialogue Volume is another setting that comes down to personal preference. But we'd suggest that you start at 50, and adjust from there.
Best controller settings
Last but not least are your controller settings, which will be the single biggest factor in your gameplay experience.
- Button Layout Preset - Tactical. There are numerous different layouts you can choose, and finding the one you are most comfortable with is always advised. But the Tactical option seems to be particularly popular.
- Turn Quick C4 Detonation on to detonate your C4 before throwing your next one.
- Have Target Aim Assist on to have the camera slow down as the crosshair moves over an enemy.
- Apply All on Armor Plate Behaviour - this means that armour plate will be applied automatically instead of having to press and hold each plate individually.
- Select Automatic Tactical Sprint in your Automatic sprint setting, which means you won't need to worry about pressing something to sprint, and can then focus on everything else.
- Turn off Controller Vibration to minimise distractions.
- With Interact/Reload Behavior, we advise that you select Prioritize Reload, as this means you'll load your weapon rather than opening a door first.
- Finally, with Stick Sensitivity, there's no right answer, other than finding what works best for you. But sensitivity between 6 and 10 seems to work well for many.
As you can see, there are a lot of potential tweaks you can make to your settings. But these are a few that will arguably make the biggest difference to your odds.
We don't want to sound like a stuck record, but play around with the settings until you feel like you've found the best set-up for you. we've just given you a good place to start before you run wild and free. And shoot people and blow up stuff. You ragamuffin.
For more content, check out how to fix the Modern Warfare 2 shadow ban bug.
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