Modern Warfare 3 campaign “Keeps crashing/black screen” PC error: Possible fixes, reasons, and more

The Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 campaign is having performance issues for a few players on PC. The game either keeps crashing or showing a black screen, after which it automatically exits to the desktop screen. What makes this particularly annoying is the absence of permanent fixes. The best one can do is to wait for Activision to come up with a hotfix.

That said, fortunately, there are some temporary community-found workarounds that you can try in order to deal with it. Today’s Modern Warfare 3 guide will go over a few of them.

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How to fix the “Keeps crashing/black screen” PC error in Modern Warfare 3

Here are a few workarounds that you will be able to try in order to deal with the constant crashing and black screen error in the Modern Warfare 3 campaign:

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1) Check hardware requirements

Your rig might not have the system requirements needed to run Modern Warfare 3. Here are the hardware requirements for the game:

Minimum

• OS: Windows 10 64 Bit (latest update)
• CPU: Intel Core i5-6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 1400
• RAM: 8 GB
• Hi-Rez Assets Cache: Up to 32 GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 / GTX 1650 or AMD Radeon RX 470
• Video Memory: 2 GB
• Storage: SSD with 149GB available space (78GB if COD HQ and Warzone are already installed)

Recommended

• OS: Windows 10 64 Bit (latest update) or Windows 11 64 Bit (latest update)
• CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
• RAM: 16 GB
• Hi-Rez Assets Cache: Up to 32 GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti / RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600XT
• Video Memory: 8 GB
• Storage: SSD with 149GB available space (78GB if COD HQ and Warzone are already installed)

Competitive / Ultra 4K Specifications

• OS: Windows 10 64 Bit (latest update) or Windows 11 64 Bit (latest update)
• CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
• RAM: 16 GB
• Hi-Rez Assets Cache: Up to 64 GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 / RTX 4070 or AMD Radeon RX 6800XT
• Video Memory: 10 GB
• Storage: SSD with 149GB available space (78GB if COD HQ and Warzone are already installed)

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2) Lower graphics settings

The shooter might be crashing on your system due to higher graphics and texture settings. So, to balance the load on your system, you might want to tone down the graphics and resolution by heading into settings, reducing the textures, and even minimizing anti-aliasing.

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3) Check file integrity

There may be corrupt files in the Modern Warfare 3 installation directory, which is causing the campaign to crash for many users.

In order to fix this issue, you will need to either make your way to the Steam or Battle.net client, select the game, and then go for one of the displayed options “scan and fix” files or “verify file integrity.”

This will automatically detect all the corrupt files in the installation directory and fix the ones that may have been damaged.

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4) Re-install the game

While it may not seem like a fix, many in the community have stated that re-installing the shooter seems to have worked for them. That also fixes the corrupt files issue, so if the above steps do not help, you can try the oldest trick in the book.

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5) Wait for a patch

One of the best fixes to the Modern Warfare 3 performance issues is to just wait for a patch. With the number of problems that the game has been facing, Activision will likely deploy an update for the game to deal with the crashing and black screen issues.