Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta starts today. PC requirements, mandatory TPM 2.0 and a known FSR issue

Early access to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta opens today, 21 August. Activision has published the full PC requirements, and buried in them are a couple of lines that will keep some players out of a match no matter how good their hardware is. There is also a separate FSR story on Radeon cards, and the warning comes from AMD itself.

The schedule: two weekends, built differently

Activision runs its Call of Duty: NEXT showcase first, and the servers open two hours later. All official times are given in Pacific time, so here they are next to UTC.

Weekend One is early access, and it is for players who placed a digital pre-order or picked up a code from a retailer. Activision spells out the platform list: Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Battle.net, Xbox on PC and Steam. Pre-loading on Steam is already live, and you only install the beta once, since Weekend Two reuses the same build.

Weekend Two is open to everyone with no pre-order, and that is where an extra platform shows up. The wording on the official beta page is exact: players "on all platforms, including Nintendo Switch 2" can join. Switch 2 does not appear in the pre-order platform list for the full game, so we are not going to turn that one line into a release announcement.

What Weekend One actually hands you

There are five core 6v6 maps: Rooftops on the snow-covered roofs of a New York hotel, Silkworm in a dense South Korean shopping district, Transit 213 in an overgrown Indian bus depot, Cachette beside a French rail terminal, and Lotus in a Korean fishing village. Six modes are live: Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, Kill Confirmed, Search and Destroy, and the new Inflation, where every elimination raises your bounty and turns you into a more valuable target.

Kill Block sits apart from that. It is an arena that reconfigures every two rounds into a new combination of three connected slabs, handing out a fresh randomised shared loadout each time. Gunfight lives there too, in the classic 3v3 and a new 10v10 variant. And for the first time in Call of Duty beta history, you get a full campaign mission, "Entrenched".

By the numbers: 19 weapons across nine classes, 14 of them in Weekend One, plus three more reachable through the campaign or default loadouts, for 22 across the whole beta. There are 21 Operators, and the level cap runs 1 to 20 in Weekend One and up to 30 in Weekend Two.

The PC requirements, and why there are two official lists

The main list went up on 19 August in the Call of Duty news feed on Steam. It is the complete one, with video memory and the storage requirement included.

Now the awkward part. The beta page in the Steam store lists the recommended tier differently: the Intel chip there is a Core i7-9700K instead of the i7-8700, the AMD card is a Radeon RX 6600 XT instead of the RX 6700 XT, and the NVIDIA card is a GeForce RTX 3060 instead of the RTX 3060 Ti. The minimum tier matches in both places.

Both lists are official, both come from Activision, and they do not agree. We are not going to pick one for you: if you want a safe target, aim at the higher pair, the RX 6700 XT and the RTX 3060 Ti. The store page also carries two lines the news post leaves out: Intel Arc cards need Resizable BAR, and only Intel and AMD processors with the AVX instruction set are supported.

TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot: without them you are not getting in

Here is the line that can make a strong machine useless. Activision states it plainly: TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot must be enabled to play Modern Warfare 4, and if they are off, you will not be able to play the beta online. There is no fallback, this is the price of entry.

The reason is RICOCHET Anti-Cheat: both Windows features make low level tampering with the system harder. You can check your machine ahead of time with the Call of Duty Secure Attestation Wizard, linked from the Activision support page. Both settings live in your motherboard UEFI, and on plenty of rigs built a couple of years ago Secure Boot was simply never switched on.

One more caveat straight from Activision: these specifications apply to the beta and may differ from the PC specifications for the full game at launch.

Drivers: Activision recommends one set, AMD shipped another

The same requirements post names recommended driver versions: NVIDIA 610.47, AMD 26.7.1 and Intel 32.0.101.8861. That list was written on 19 August, and the very next day AMD shipped Adrenalin 26.8.1, whose new game support section names "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Open Beta Early Access" outright.

So the current AMD driver knows about this beta, while the game requirements point at a version a month older. And the same 26.8.1 release notes carry a known issue that lands on exactly this beta.

AMD FSR Upscaling and AMD FSR Frame Generation may show as inactive in AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition while playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Open Beta Early Access when enabled on Radeon RX 9000 series graphics products.

AMD, Adrenalin 26.8.1 release notes

Read that carefully. AMD is describing the readout in the Adrenalin panel, not the upscaler failing inside the game. The phrase "may show as inactive" is about what the software reports, not about the result on screen. Claiming FSR is broken in the beta is not something this source supports, and we are not going to claim it: you will have to check with your eyes and a frame counter rather than a status icon. If you want a sense of how FSR 4.1 compares with DLSS right now, we ran a blind test with more than six thousand votes.

Shader preloading, and what Weekend Two adds

The notable PC side addition is shader preloading. The game prepares shaders in the background before you launch it, so you spend less time compiling on first boot and hit fewer hitches mid match. You can interrupt the process by right clicking it in the system tray or turn it off in settings with no penalty, since compilation simply resumes once you are in the game.

One caveat is specific to Steam: a one time shader compile still happens on first boot, the way it works today, and Steam players only feel the benefit of preloading on the Weekend Two update. A small thing, but an annoying one, because the first launch into a beta is exactly the moment people lose patience.

Weekend Two adds Ground War on Combat Outpost and Warzone Resurgence on a new map called Zodiac, a drone assembly and manufacturing site with offices, rooftops, tunnels and a shoreline. The level cap rises to 30, the remaining five weapons open up, along with more equipment and perks.

The full game arrives on 23 October 2026 with Infinity Ward leading development. Campaign early access is promised from 16 October for digital pre-orders, and the Steam store page lists the game at 69.99 dollars. Rewards earned during the beta carry over into the full release.