Whenever Call of Duty updates on PC, Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone players need to wait for their shaders to pre-load to ensure a smooth experience. It’s an annoying process, and it gets even worse if you encounter the bug that causes shader pre-loading to get stuck.
It’s a frustratingly common occurrence for PC players, but there are a few things you can try to kickstart the shader compilation process so you can get into MW3 or Warzone faster. Some players are reporting that their shader pre-loading is stuck at 0%, others have shader pre-loading stuck at 3%, and there are all sorts of similar shader compilation roadblocks that you can run into when playing MW3 on PC.
What to Do If Shaders Won’t Load in Call of Duty
If your shader pre-loading is stuck in Modern Warfare 3 or Warzone, the easiest solution is just to wait. It may seem like shader pre-loading is stuck at 0%, but in reality, it just takes a really long time for shaders to compile sometimes.
Some players have reported that it can take 20-30 minutes for shaders to pre-load after major updates, so that might be the case for you. It’s hardware-dependent, but even powerful graphics cards still have long wait times for shader pre-loading.
If your shader progress doesn’t go up after a while, though, then head to the settings menu and find the option to restart shaders pre-loading. This will delete the shader cache and start the pre-loading process over from scratch, which should eliminate any problems that were holding the process up. You’ll need to restart the game for this to work, and it’s best to just leave the game at the main menu after rebooting to give the shaders time to load.
If that doesn’t work, then changing your graphics settings could help. Head to the Display section of the Graphics settings menu and then change some options. Make any change to a random setting like Gamma and then click apply settings. For some reason, this can force your shader pre-loading progress to start climbing.
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As a last resort, completely rebooting your PC and restarting Call of Duty can help. While a full system reboot may not be necessary, closing and reopening Modern Warfare 3 or Warzone can force the shaders to start pre-loading correctly. If it worked, the percentage should start climbing noticeably faster than it was before.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to get around shader pre-loading if you’re playing Call of Duty on PC. Every time you update your drivers or update the game, you’ll need to wait for them to pre-load before playing if you want a smooth experience. If you don’t, you’ll run into performance problems or other MW3 issues.
