Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, after much anticipation, finally came out last week. It is a reboot of the older Modern Warfare (COD 4) which, arguably, is the best Call of Duty game ever made. The new entry re-imagines the franchise in a much darker and grittier setting. Infinity Ward has gone back to what made Modern Warfare so great in the first place and has given the series a much-needed makeover.
In addition to that, the single-player campaign is being described as one of the best in the series. This is due to the fact that players will have to make choices that will determine the outcome of the story. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare also sees the return of some fan favourite characters like Captain Price.
Other than the single player, the multiplayer mode has also been revamped. The maps are now much bigger and, without jetpacks, mobility is reduced. However, the slower paced gameplay has been requested by fans for a very long time. We also have a bunch of new additional game modes to spice things up in multiplayer.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has managed to become the most successful Call of Duty game of this generation. Despite that, the game is ridden bugs and performance issues. Players on all platforms have reported multiple issues with the performance of the game. This is probably because of a bad optimization job by the developer but thankfully, a lot of these issues can be ironed out by adjusting a few things on your end. So, here are a few fixes that you could try in order to get rid of performance related issues on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
1. Minimum System Requirements for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Before we dive into potential fixes, the first thing you need to do is make sure that your PC is even capable of running the game smoothly. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a visually stunning game and thus, is also very demanding. If your PC doesn’t meet the minimum requirements, no fix is going to work for you. Here are the minimum system requirements for the game:
Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit (SP1) or Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: Intel Core i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300
Memory: 8GB RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 or AMD Radeon HD 7950
Storage: 175 GB of available space
Direct X: Version 12
2. Install the latest graphics card drivers
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is still a relatively new game. If you haven’t booted up your PC for a while before playing this game, your graphics card drivers are probably outdated. Luckily, NVIDIA released its game ready drivers for the game right before its release. On the other side, AMD released its newer drivers too as the game came out. While these may not eradicate all of the performance issues within the game, they will at least minimize them. You can download these drivers via the links given below:
3. Disable the integrated GPU usage for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Sometimes when a game boots up, it decides to use your integrated GPU instead of the dedicated graphics card. This is a widespread issue that most people have to face, especially those with laptops. The integrated GPU is obviously nowhere near as good as your dedicated one so it results in appallingly low framerates. Thankfully, you can forcefully disable the integrated GPU so that the game only uses the dedicated graphics card. Here’s how to do it:
- Right Click anywhere on an empty desktop and open the NVIDIA Control Panel.
- Choose the “Manage 3D Settings” option.
- Look for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in the list of games and when you’ve found it, select your dedicated graphics card on it.
- If you can’t find the game on the list for some reason, you can add the executable (.exe) file for it by browsing.
Everything that you need to know about Call of Duty: Mobile
4. Change Graphics Card settings
If the changes above don’t work, you can try tweaking some of your graphics card settings from the control panel. Sometimes, graphics cards prioritize quality over performance. You can follow these steps to change that:
For NVIDIA users:
- Open NVIDIA Control Panel by right clicking an empty space on the desktop.
- Select the “Manage 3D Settings” tab and navigate to the Program Settings.
- From the list of games under the “Select a program to customize” menu, find Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and select it.
- Change the Power Management mode to Highest Performance mode.
- Select Single Display Performance under the Display mode setting.
- Turn on Threaded Optimization.
- Select Performance Mode under Texture Filtering Quality.
- Turn off Low Latency Mode.
- If you have a compatible monitor, turn on G-Sync.
For AMD users:
Open AMD Control Center and make the following changes:
- Turn off V-Sync.
- Set the Texture Filtering Quality to Performance Mode.
- Change the Anti-Aliasing settings to Use Application settings and Multi-sampling.
- Turn off Morphological Filtering.
- Disable Chill, Maximum Tessellation Level and OpenGL Triple Buffering.
- Choose the AMD optimized option under Shader Cache.
5. Change in-game settings for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
While modern games are pretty good at guessing optimal settings for your hardware, they can still be a bit off the mark sometimes. You can try changing these internal video settings to get the best out of the game. Here are the video settings for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare that are recommended for optimal performance without losing too much quality:
- Set the Display Mode to Full screen and Render Resolution to 100.
- Disable V-Sync and Custom Framerate limit.
- Change the Texture Resolution to Normal and Texture Filter Anisotropic to High.
- Disable Bullet Impacts and Tessellation.
- Turn off all forms of Filmic Strength and Film Grain.
- Set the Ambient Occlusion to GTAO.
- Change the Particle Quality and Lighting to High.
- Turn off Anti-Aliasing.
- Set the Shadow Map Resolution to Medium.
6. Update Windows 10
If you’re running Windows 10 and haven’t updated it for a while, chances are that it is the cause of many of your problems. The previous Windows update released a few weeks ago caused a lot of performance related issues, especially in games. This was due to a bug that caused the CPU usage to skyrocket.
However, Microsoft has released a new update that irons out those bugs. So, if you haven’t updated yet, you definitely should. Here’s how you can make sure that you’re on the latest version of Windows 10:
- Go to Settings and click on Update & Security.
- Click on Check for Updates.
- If newer updates are found, wait for Windows to install them.
- Restart your PC for the update to take effect.
7. Repair Call of Duty: Modern Warfare using Battle.net
If you’re having severe performance issues and your game is constantly crashing, you might be missing some files. Battle.net launcher has a feature that scans through the game files and verifies them. If it founds out that any of those files is missing, it downloads them and repairs the game. Here’s how to run the scan:
- Launch Battle.net and select Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
- Open the Options menu and select Scan and Repair.
- After it is done, restart Battle.net.
8. Remove secondary display
Some games are not very well optimized for multiple monitor setups so sometimes, having a secondary monitor can hinder your performance. This is a widespread issue that is being improved gradually but still hasn’t been completely eradicated.
A few people have reported that disconnecting their secondary displays has helped with improving performance. Just disconnect your secondary monitor by pulling out your HDMI or Display Port cable and then restart your PC.
8. Change the Task Manager priority
If nothing else works, you can try to dedicate more resources to the game via Task Manager. While the chances of this working are pretty low, it might do the trick for you. Just follow these steps:
- Run Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
- Tab out of the game and open the Task Manager.
- Under the Details tab, find Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
- Right click the game and set its priority to High.
If none of these changes are working for you, there might be an actual bug with the game. The only thing that you can do in that case is report it to Infinity Ward and wait for a patch.