Screengrab per Activision

How to fix lag in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone

Improving your gameplay performance so you can have the best experience possible.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone can potentially exhibit quite a bit of lag on your machine. It’s an exhausting concept to deal with on any online multiplayer game, but especially in these games due to the competitive nature of the title and the quick-trigger reflexes required to win. You can do a handful of things to improve your connection and ensure you have the best experience possible. We highly recommend you have a wired connection rather than rely on a wireless one. Wired will always beat out wireless or a wi-fi device every time.

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The first step is to ensure you’re encountering issues with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Warzone when the servers are down on Activision’s side. You can do that by checking Activision’s website, downdetector is also a reliable method to see if there are any problems, or Activision Support’s Twitter page.

If everything looks there, you may want to also check on your internet provider’s services. Things could be choppy on their end that are making things worse for you.

After going through those two methods, we recommend going restarting your consoles and PC. Before restarting, for PC users, you want to make sure you’ve downloaded the latest drivers to your graphics card. You can do that depending on what manufacturer hardware you’re using. You can then perform a restart to see if there are any noticeable changes.

When you’re still having problems, you want to turn off any background applications that could be disrupting your experience with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Warzone. You’ll find that even the smallest application can drag down your hardware, making it more difficult for you to play the game.

If you’re still having trouble with all of that, it might be best to do a fresh reinstall of the game on your platform or console. For those on a console, you shouldn’t be dealing with too much lag, and that could be a hint at a larger problem with your hardware. Once you’ve reinstalled the game, the problems should clear up after going through everything again one more time.


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Author
Zack Palm
Zack Palm is the Senior Writer of Gamepur and has spent over five years covering video games, and earned a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Oregon State University. He spends his free time biking, running tabletop campaigns, and listening to heavy metal. His primary game beats are Pokémon Go, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV, and any newly released title, and he finds it difficult to pull away from any Star Wars game.