Infinity Ward resolves two long-standing PC issues in CoD MW4. The beta preloads shaders in the background and drastically reduces annoying restarts after updates.
The developers of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4—Infinity Ward and co-developer Beenox—have revealed the remaining details about the upcoming CoD: MW4 beta for this weekend. In addition to preload information and PC specs, they announced a major technical breakthrough for PC players. The goal is to finally put an end to the interminably long load times associated with shader compilation.
In a detailed blog post, the developers explain how they plan to tackle the annoying “compiling shaders” issue. Almost all PC gamers are probably familiar with this. After all, it doesn’t just happen in Call of Duty. It’s become so common that you’re probably surprised when a game doesn’t take forever to do it.
A quick refresher: Modern PC games need shaders to tell your graphics card how to render the image on the screen. The game compiles these shaders for effects, lighting, shadows, and surfaces in advance. This prevents the game from stuttering when the system retrieves these elements in the middle of a match.
The problem with this: Compiling the shaders takes time. Plus, the game has to run through the entire process from scratch every time you launch it for the first time, update your GPU drivers, or when a major patch is released. Consoles don’t have this problem. Since the hardware and software are standardized, the downloads come with the shaders already pre-compiled.
But with the Modern Warfare 4 beta, that’s changing on PC. Starting now, Call of Duty can preload shaders even before you launch the game. Once the download is complete, the shader preload runs smoothly in the background. However, there are still a few minor issues.
During the beta, it’s best to use the Battle.net launcher to try out the new feature. That’s the only place where shader preloading starts automatically by default. The feature is also enabled on Steam, but when you launch the game for the very first time, you’ll still have to wait for the classic “Compiling Shaders” screen—even though it should be much faster this time around. On every subsequent launch, however, the preload will kick in as intended.
This is an important first step. But you won’t truly experience the full power of this new technology until the full release of Modern Warfare 4. Then, you’ll only have to compile the shaders on your PC once—and not after every major seasonal update, as is still the case today.
The Modern Warfare 4 beta tackles yet another persistent problem on PC: the infamous “Update requires a restart” message. Call of Duty veterans know this game all too well: As soon as you launch the game on PC or console, it checks for updates and installs them if necessary. However, to activate the patch, you have to restart the game. Sometimes the system doesn’t bundle the updates, so you have to repeat the process several times before you can finally start playing. This happens especially often if you haven’t played Call of Duty in a while.
Starting with the Modern Warfare 4 beta, Infinity Ward is drastically reducing the frequency of these forced breaks. Simply put: The developers are ensuring that the game will be able to download more types of patches in the future without requiring you to restart immediately.
This doesn’t completely eliminate the problem, though. For example, if you’re kicked out of an ongoing match due to an update, the game will still need to be restarted. However, such cases are expected to occur much less frequently in the future.
Similar to the shader update, there are a few quirks here as well. On PC—regardless of which store you bought the game from—and on the PlayStation 5, the improvement works seamlessly. If you’re playing on Xbox, you’ll still need to restart for updates for now, but the developers are working on reducing this by launch. The only platform that unfortunately gets nothing at all is the Nintendo Switch 2. Here, you won’t be able to avoid restarts—neither in the beta nor at launch.
“The ‘update requires a restart’ issue won’t disappear completely, but our goal is simple: fewer forced restarts and fewer interruptions between you and your next match,” the developers explain.
The first phase of the Modern Warfare 4 beta starts today, August 21. It begins right after the “Call of Duty: Next” live event, where the developers will showcase most of the new maps and modes. The preload has been available since yesterday (August 20, 2026, 6:00 p.m.). Important for all PC players: Be sure to check beforehand whether you have TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot enabled—both are absolutely necessary to play!
