We suspect that you’re here because of those infuriating Call of Duty Modern Warfare stuttering cutscenes. Yep, it appears that the latest installment in the franchise is causing plenty of lag issues for players on all platforms. PC gamers in particular have been hit by these glitches, so you’ll want to know how to fix them. Our guide on the matter has some answers for you, including a few workarounds that could make the game’s non-playable parts, well, playable. Check out this Call of Duty Modern Warfare stuttering cutscenes article for some much-needed help, soldier.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare Stuttering Cutscenes | PC glitches
As we mentioned up top, those of you playing the game on PC are being hit hardest by these cutscene problems. There are one or two mentions of it occurring on PS4 and Xbox One, but nothing as widespread as PC players.
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Threads on cutscene issues have appeared across the game’s subreddit, the official Call of Duty forums, and social media since the game was released on October 25. It doesn’t seem to matter what graphics card is installed on any system, or what frames-per-second (FPS) reading players are getting. The bug is affecting plenty regardless of their setup.
The main issue with stuttering cutscenes comes from pre-rendered CGI ones, too. You and others might find that in-game cutscenes—i.e. those that take place during playable sections—aren’t affected by this. It only seems to be those that occur between campaign levels. Some are finding that the game is unplayable as a result, with a drop in framerate right down to 0 FPS in some cases.
How to Fix Call of Duty Modern Warfare Stuttering Cutscenes
Unfortunately, there’s no official fix out in the wild yet. Infinity Ward and Activision are aware of this problem and are hard at work sorting out a patch for it. They state that it’s related to background disk usage so, hopefully, sorting that area out will solve this. Nothing has come in the 1.05 update, which we’ve covered here, so it might be a few more days before this is completely resolved.
However, players have found a couple of workarounds that do make Call of Duty Modern Warfare stuttering cutscenes much more manageable to watch. These are temporary fixes, so don’t bet on them sorting the problem out for you forever. They’ll do while we wait for Infinity Ward to solve this global problem, though, so read a few of them below and see if they work for you.
Change Custom Framerate Limit
- A few players have found that changing this setting to “Unlimited” fixed the problem for them
- Head to the “Graphics” tab and scroll down to “Custom Framerate Limit.” Select “Unlimited” from the drop-down menu
- Save your changes and then load up your most recent save file to see if this helps
- You may still experience a bit of lag, but not to the same degree that you did before
Move Modern Warfare onto an external drive
- This has had mixed results for Redditors, but it may work for you
- Try moving the entire game from your PC’s HDD to an external hard drive. This will take a while as Modern Warfare is a massive game
- Load the game up, open a save file, and see if cutscenes still lag. If this helps, play the game from an SSD until Infinity Ward can patch a fix through
Turn off Nvidia In-Game Overlay
- If you have an Nvidia graphics card, turning off “In-game overlay” fixes the issue as it removes Shadowplay from the experience
- Open up Nvidia GeForce experience’s Settings section. Find “In-game Overlay” and toggle this off
- Load up the game and your last save file to see if this helps
- Lag may still turn up occasionally, but not as much as before
Full-screen temporary fix
- If you’re playing in full-screen mode instead of windowed, press and hold Alt+Tab for two to three seconds
- Release both keys at the same time to potentially sort out lag issues
