How to Fix Call of Duty Warzone Crashes or Freezes with High CPU Usage?
If you’re an action game lover, you have probably heard about Call of Duty. It’s one of the most popular first-person shooting video games with an excellent...
Subodh Gupta
Last updated on May 25, 2023
Subodh Gupta
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Subodh loves to write content whether it may be tech-related or other. After writing on tech blog for a year, he becomes passionate about it. He loves playing games and listening to music. Apart from blogging, he is addictive to the gaming PC builds and smartphone leaks.
If you’re an action game lover, you have probably heard about Call of Duty. It’s one of the most popular first-person shooting video games with an excellent storyline, stunning graphics, advanced weapons, and more. Recently, Activision launched a new part of 2019’s Modern Warfare of COD called Call of Duty: Warzone, an online battle royale game. However, the newly launched COD game crashes or freezes with High CPU Usage. Check out how to fix Call of Duty Warzone crashes.
In this game mode, 150 players can jump and survive in the playground. The game is free for everyone and available for Windows PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 4 platforms. Call of Duty Warzone also features another game mode, Plunder, except for the Battle Royale. Now, talking about the Plunder game mode, players must collect higher in-match cash prizes by looting over the map, killing enemies to steal their cash, and more.
In the newly released Call of Duty Warzone game, players face issues like crashing, gameplay freezing, or a black cloud-like graphical glitch. Meanwhile, the Warzone players also complain that Warzone is using CPU up to 100%, leading the game to crash quite often. However, there is no official statement available yet from Activision or Infinity Ward about this issue or bug. It’s quite expected that developers will soon fix this issue and release a new update.
Here are the few reported users in the Reddit community regarding the crashes and freezes.
Ryzen 7 / 2070 Super build. Whenever I play warzone it basically just kicks me off and crashes my PC. No clue why this is the case. Maybe I’m missing a specific driver update? Anyone gone through a similar situation and fixed it? by u/YoungMusk
Another user reported that he is facing two problems in the game
hello, I have two problems with the warzone that’s making the game unplayable for me. first one is: the game keeps crashing when I press the windows key or tap out and before that it crashed when I try to open the game but I fixed that, second: I can’t hear any audio in game except the menu music audio, can’t hear gunshots running or anything at all, also the game crashes if I change anything in the graphics settings, crash error: (directX encountered an unrecoverable error) – u/ADMIRAL_boray
A Player report that his PC shutdowns in the middle while on the game.
Please help me decide if I should buy a new GPU. Pc completely shuts off in the middle of playing the game. It plays other games without issues but maybe this one is more demanding. Will getting a a better gpu such as 1080ti fix the issue? Specs: Asrock b360m itx i5 8600k Corsair dominator 2600mhz 16gb Asus rog strix rx 580 8gb – u/eddywap1738
Another user named u/GGGomer reported that the game is crashing every 5 minutes in any match since the solo patch update.
Warzone crashes after about 5 minutes in any match since the solo’s patch.
Specs far exceed recommended requirements.
Updated hardware drivers to newest versions.
Since the update I’ve now had 4 crashes in 4 different matches, all within the first 5 minutes of play. 3 of which were in Solo’s, and to rule the gamemode out one of them was also in Groups. It freezes for about a second and then CTD’s without any error notification afterwards.
I sent in a couple of bug reports as I’ve been testing it but it’s 100% consistent as of right now. Sadly this now makes the game completely unplayable. (If you don’t count messing with loadouts actual gameplay =P )
Hereby a warning for everyone, and don’t forget to leave a bug report if you run into it!
How to Fix Call of Duty Warzone Crashes or Freezes with High CPU Usage?
Activision has announced a general guide to fix the crashes or freezes for PS4, Xbox, and PC that you can follow.
Whenever the game freezes, you will need to quit the game and close the application completely. Then restart the game and it should work perfectly. However, in some instances, you might also need to restart your console or PC to take effect the changes. Make sure to restart the game from the dashboard, if not works then you can try rebooting the PC or console.
If the above method doesn’t work, you can follow some possible workarounds below.
1. Update Graphics Drivers
One of the most common issues of the graphics intensive games is outdated or corrupted graphics drivers on the PC. Make sure to simply head over to the official site or the assistant software and check for available updates. If you’re using Nvidia graphics, then go to the official site and download the latest version.
While the AMD graphics users can update their drivers from the AMD Radeon Software or via the official site.
2. Set a Lower Priority
Sometimes, the higher process priority can also cause system crashes or game crashes. As the priority always set to higher by default, you can set a lower one.
Go to the Task Manager > Click on the Details tab.
Search and right-click on the game’s process > Click on Set Priority > Select Normal.
Once done, click on Change Priority to confirm it.
Finally, close the game and relaunch it. [You can also reboot the computer]
3. Disable Nvidia In-game Overlay to Fix Call of Duty Warzone Crashes
In most cases, it also found that Nvidia In-game overlay can also cause game crashes or freezes which is quite awkward.
Go to the Geforce Experience on the PC.
Click on Settings inside the interface > Click on the General tab.
Turn off the In-Game Overlay toggle.
Close both the window and the game.
Restart the game and check whether it works or not.
4. Increase Virtual Memory
As the name suggests, Virtual Memory is a specific space of your hard disk that can be used as a virtual RAM to load and process the heavy tasks or games smoothly.
Head over to the My Computer and right-click on it > Click on Properties.
In the left pane, click on Advanced system settings.
Then click on System Properties > Click on the Advanced tab.
Now, click on the Settings button under the Performance.
Click on Virtual Memory > Select Change.
Uncheck‘Automatically manage paging files size for all drives’ option.
Select the drive where the game is installed and choose the Custom size.
Put a value more than 2GB (2048MB) for both the Initial and Maximum size.
Once done, click on Set and then click on OK.
Finally, click on the OK button again > Reboot your computer.
5. Disable Other Services
Make sure that you’ve disabled all the unnecessary and higher CPU/Memory consuming background running overlay apps like Xbox Game Bar, Discord, Steam Overlay, and more. Whereas some of the desktop browsers can also consume a lot of processing power like Google Chrome. So, try to disable them all.
Just head over to the Task Manager > Go to Processes.
Right-click on the overlay apps one by one and select End Task.
Once all overlay processes are removed from the list, close the Task Manager.
Head over to the respective overlay apps and try to manually disable them.
Additionally, you can also select and close Cortana.exe and Runtime Broker processes from the list.
Finally, restart your computer and launch the Warzone game again.
6. Disable Startup Programs
Startup programs are those who start running automatically in the background whenever the system boots up. So, even if you don’t use those apps or services, they always run in the background and can a lot of CPU/Memory usage.
Just head over to the Task Manager > Go to Startup.
Right-click on the High Startup Impact programs and Disable them individually.
Restart your PC and run the game again.
7. Adjust in-game Settings
Launch the Battle.net client > Head over to the Call of Duty Warzone (Modern Warfare) graphics settings followed by Options.
Now, set the Display mode to Full-screen.
Set the Custom frame rate limit to 180.
Set Display Gamma to 2.2 sRGB.
Choose Texture resolution to Low.
Select Shadow Map Resolution to Normal.
Choose Particle Lighting to Normal.
Ambient Occlusion to Disabled.
Finally, don’t forget to apply your changes and hit Save/OK.
Restart your game client and try running your game.
Tip:
Now, if you’ve already tried out all the mentioned troubleshooting steps and nothing works for you, make sure to proceed to Warzone PC crash form to fill up & submit for better support. Meanwhile, the Activision Support Team is now trying to fix this issue and has recently posted some troubleshooting steps on Reddit to fix the game crashing issue.
Check out some of the possible troubleshooting steps below by Activision Support:
Perform a clean install of graphics drivers
Ensure your drivers are updated
Ensure you have the latest version of Windows installed
Run a Scan and Repair through the BattleNet client
