Modern Warfare 2 “Stutter and Frame Drops” error: How to fix performance, possible reasons, and more

While the Modern Warfare 2 campaign’s early access has garnered an overall positive response from the community, the title seems to face a fair number of performance issues.

From system crashes to blurry screens to the campaign not booting up, there have been issues with how the game is currently running on all the major platforms. One of the most annoying errors is the issue that seems to be causing frequent stutters and frame drops while playing the game.

This error does not have a permanent solution yet and is best left to the developers to patch out. However, if you are not willing to wait for the next patch update, there are a few things you can do to help make the problem more bearable in Modern Warfare 2.

Today’s guide will specifically go over some steps you can take to try and solve the “Stutter and Frame Drops” error in the latest franchise entry.

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Fixing the “Stutter and Frame Drops” error in Modern Warfare 2

Frame drops and in-game stutters are usually caused by incompatibility errors with Modern Warfare 2 and your system. While you can wait for Activision to launch a patch to fix optimization, there are a few things you can do from your end to tackle the problem.

Hence, in order to fix the “Stutter and frame Drops” issue in Modern Warfare 2, you will be required to,

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1) Check your system requirements and probably tone down your graphics

Toning down the graphics and display resolution of the game will be one of the best ways to tackle the stuttering in the shooter. It’s likely that your system does not support the graphics and texture fidelity that the shooter is currently running on. Hence, your best bet would be to go through the minimum and recommended requirements for Modern Warfare 2 and tone your graphics down accordingly.

Below is a list of the minimum and recommended system requirements for the shooter:

Minimum System Requirements

• OS – Windows 10 64 Bit
• Processor – Intel® Core™ i3-6100 / Core™ i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen™ 3 1200
• Memory – 8GB RAM
• GPU – NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 960 or AMD Radeon™ RX 470 – DirectX 12.0 compatible system
• Storage – 125 GB available space

Recommended System Requirements

• OS – Windows 10 64 Bit / Windows 11 64 Bit
• Processor – Intel® Core™ i5-6600K / Core™ i7-4770 or AMD Ryzen™ 5 1400
• Memory – 12 GB RAM
• GPU – NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon™ RX 580 – DirectX 12.0 compatible system
• Storage – 125 GB available space

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2) Updating the game or scanning the installed files

It’s quite likely that the version mismatch is causing Modern Warfare 2 to drop frames in your system, or perhaps there are installed files that are corrupt. The best way to deal with this is to look for the game’s updated files or scan the existing ones.

Both the clients of Battle.net and Steam will allow you to look for the most recent version of Modern Warfare 2 and even allow you to search for the files in the installation directory to weed out any which may have been corrupted.

Once the scanning is done, the clients will either automatically update the shooter to the latest version or replace the corrupted files with the new ones.

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3) Updating your GPU drivers

Updating the drivers of your installed graphics has also seemed to do the trick for many in the community. To do so, you can either use the respective Nvidia or AMD desktop application to automatically update the drivers or right-click on the Start menu and open Device Manager. From there, you can go to Display Adapters and then click on the drop-down to bring up your graphics driver.

There you will find the update option, and upon clicking on it, you will be able to update your GPU driver version.