Modern Warfare 3 campaign “Keeps lagging/Stuttering” error: Possible fix, reasons, and more

Modern Warfare 3's campaign seems to be presenting a fair bit of lag, stuttering issues, and FPS drops on the PC. These problems stem from optimization errors that are unlikely to be fixed permanently until Activision deals with them with a patch or a hotfix. Lags have made certain parts of this game's campaign quite unplayable for many players.

The constant FPS fluctuations are ruining the gameplay experience, and it’s not all that surprising that players are flooding social media websites to look up fixes for this problem. Fortunately, a few community-driven solutions seem to have worked for some gamers.

This Modern Warfare 3 guide will go over what you can do to deal with the lag and stuttering issues in the campaign.

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How to fix “Keeps lagging/Stuttering” error in Modern Warfare 3

Here are some of the community-found workarounds that you can try to deal with lag and stuttering issues in Modern Warfare 3:

1) Lower graphics settings

While your system might be able to shoulder more graphical load, if the shooter constantly seems to lag and stutter, you might want to lower its textures and graphics settings. By putting less stress on your hardware, you should be able to get a much better performance in the campaign.

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2) Close background processes

If you have any background processes active on your PC that are eating away at your RAM, then you might want to close them so as to get a much better experience in the game. Hence, before launching the game from the client, make sure you have closed all background applications.

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3) Check system requirement

Lagging and stuttering issues might present themselves if you're using a hardware setup that is not capable of optimally running Modern Warfare 3. Here are the minimum and recommended system requirements for this shooter:

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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4) Update your graphics drivers

Updating your GPU drivers can also help stabilize performance in Modern Warfare 3. One of the best ways of going about this will be to download the AMD or Nvidia desktop application (depending on the card that you are using). Subsequently, you can use the downloaded program to automatically detect and download the latest drivers.

Alternatively, you can manually keep your drivers updated via AMD or Nvidia's website:

• Nvidia users can click here.
• AMD users can follow this link

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5) Wait for a patch or reach out to Activision Support

If you still face frequent lags and stuttering issues in Modern Warfare 3, then the best thing you can do is to wait for a patch from Activision to fix it.

You can also reach out to Activision Support to inform them of your problem and get their team to help with all the performance issues you are facing.