[5] Development of the engine and the Call of Duty games has resulted in the inclusion of advanced graphical features while maintaining an average of 60 frames per second on the consoles and PC.

The IW 4.0 engine featured texture streaming technology to create much higher environmental detail without sacrificing performance.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II took advantage of DirectX 11 video cards on the Windows version of the game.

Since the main developer was Infinity Ward they returned to their original engine naming system and called that iteration IW 6.0.

[10] IW 6.0 was compatible with systems such as Xbox One and PlayStation 4 so polygon counts, texture detail and overall graphical fidelity had increased.

[12][13] Ghosts used Iris Adjust tech which allowed the player to experience from a person's point of view how their eyes would react to changes in lighting conditions realistically.

[20][21] Dubbed IW 8.0, the engine was created within five years, and featured substantial upgrades such as spectral rendering, volumetric lighting and support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the PC version.

[29] Call of Duty: Vanguard was powered by the same engine used in Modern Warfare and Warzone with enhancements from developer Sledgehammer Games.

[32][33][34] Dubbed IW 9.0,[35] the engine was co-developed by Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games, and was planned to be used in future installments of the series in a unified effort to ensure that every studio was working with the same tools,[36][37][38] allowing them to create a single cross-game launcher, known as Call of Duty HQ, which was later known as the Call of Duty launcher.

[41][42] Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare featured Sledgehammer Games' heavily modified in-house branch of the IW engine, with only a few lines of legacy code remaining.

[51][52][53] Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered was confirmed to have been developed on an advanced version of this engine with modifications from Beenox.