Modern Warfare 4 shipped its PC build with a settings trap. The official Call of Duty Updates account said on October 22 that NVIDIA DLSS technologies are currently unavailable while ray tracing is enabled, and pointed at the public issue board where the studio had already logged it. The post says the team is working with NVIDIA to make the two work together, with more information to come.
Confirmed. The limitation is stated by the official Call of Duty Updates account on October 22, pointing at the studio's own public issue board, and the same item shows up in Insider Gaming's read of that board. No fix date is given.
Why hardcore SnD cares
Nothing about ray tracing wins a one-life round. Frame stability does. DLSS upscaling is how most PC players hold a high frame rate without dropping render resolution into mush, so losing it to a lighting toggle is a real cost for anyone who switched ray tracing on for the campaign and then queued into Hardcore Search.
- Set it once. Ray tracing off keeps DLSS available, and that is what a competitive lobby wants until the studio says the combination is fixed.
- The named interim path. If you want the denoiser on anyway, the official post names SMAA Nx with Variable Rate Shading as the pairing built to work together.
- Recheck after patches. This is logged as a current issue rather than a design choice, so an update can change which combinations are allowed without anyone announcing it in your lobby.
What the studio actually said
The post is narrow and worth reading narrowly. It covers DLSS while ray tracing is enabled, not DLSS in general, and it carries no date for a fix. Our tracked coverage of NVIDIA's October note on DLSS 4.5 support in Modern Warfare 4 still stands as far as it goes. This adds a limitation that announcement did not mention.
Ray tracing off, DLSS on, and leave the denoiser to the people playing the campaign. Revisit it when a patch note says the pairing works.