Call of Duty Modern Warfare will be introducing a new engine to the series which will allow for a variety of new effects and features. The series has previously used IW Engine, which itself was a modified version of the id Tech 3 engine used in the original Call of Duty. However, whether or not this engine is another iteration of IW Engine or built from the ground up for Modern Warfare isn’t known yet.
The name of the new engine used in Call of Duty Modern Warfare hasn’t been named yet, but it does bring some impressive capabilities to the table. One of the big features that PC gamers will love is DirectX Raytracing support. If you were an early adopter of NVIDIA’s RTX line, then you know that pickings have been slim when it comes to games that actually support real-time raytracing.
The new engine also brings:
- A hybrid tile-based streaming system
- New PBR decal rendering system
- World volumetric lighting
- 4K HDR
- New GPU geometry pipeline
- Spectral rendering that delivers real-time thermal and night-vision in-game
- Dolby ATMOS support
All these things combine to produce what is presumably the highest-fidelity Call of Duty experience yet. It’s unknown whether or not the Call of Duty game after Modern Warfare will use this new engine or not. Since the franchise has several studios producing titles, it’s possible we may see another iteration of the BLOPS engine used for the Treyarch games. Alternatively, all studios might finally switch to using the same engine.
In any case, Call of Duty Modern Warfare‘s new engine gets the series poised to take advantage of the improved capabilities of the PS5 and next Xbox. Both are rumored to support DXR, so having that option baked into the engine should allow Infinity Ward and company to have a toe up on the competition.