While sharing the remaining details about the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta scheduled for this weekend – such as pre-load information and PC specs – Infinity Ward and co-developer Beenox have revealed an unexpected PC gaming breakthrough. It’s to do with eliminating elongated wait times associated with compiling a game’s shaders.
In a wide-ranging blog post, the Call of Duty developers discussed their solution to the ‘Compiling Shaders’ issue most PC players should be familiar with. This isn’t isolated to just Call of Duty games; it’s so widespread it’s a surprise when a game doesn’t have it.
To recap, modern games on PC require shaders to tell your graphics card how to render what you see on screen. By compiling shaders for things like effects, lighting, shadows and surfaces ahead of time, the game doesn’t have to struggle in the moment when these are called on during play.
The problem is that compiling shaders can take time, and that it has to be done in full when you start a game for the first time, after you update your GPU drivers, and when major patches are released. Consoles do not have this problem, since their downloads come with shaders included, due to their standardised hardware and software configurations.
But starting with the Modern Warfare 4 beta, Call of Duty games are now capable of pre-loading shaders before you load them up. Once the download is complete, shaders start pre-loading in the background, though this comes with a few caveats.
For now, the Battle.net launcher appears to be the optimal way to experience this tech during the beta, because it’s the only place shader pre-loading begins by default. On Steam, shader pre-loading is enabled, but you’ll need to sit through the ‘Compiling Shaders’ step still, the first time you start the game – though it should be faster. Any time you launch the game in the future, shader pre-loading should achieve the intended effect.
This is a notable first step, but the real benefits of this new tech won’t be felt until Modern Warfare 4’s full release, as that’s when PC players need to compile shaders once, without having to do so each major seasonal update, as is the case today.
The Modern Warfare 4 beta is also addressing another long-standing PC technical issue: the ‘Update Requires Restart’ phenomenon, which Call of Duty players should be very familiar with.
When launching on PC and consoles, the game checks for updates, and if it finds one, it installs it – a process which requires a game restart before it takes effect. In certain cases, updates are not applied together, meaning you may have to repeat this process several times before you can actually play. This is common when returning to a Call of Duty game you haven’t played in a while.
Starting with the Modern Warfare 4 beta, Infinity Ward is reducing the number of instances in which this is going to happen. In simple terms, the developer is making it so more types of patches can be downloaded without the need for a restart.
That change won’t affect all cases; if an update arrives as you’re playing and you get kicked out, a restart will still be required. But the goal is that those instances are rarer.
Much like the shader situation, the update has a few quirks of its own. PC players – regardless of the store they bought the game from – should get the intended experience. PlayStation 5 players likewise receive the fix. Xbox players, however, are still required to restart to apply an update, but the developer is working to reduce these situations for the game’s full release. The only platform to not benefit from that work is, unfortunately, Nintendo Switch 2, where restarts continue to be required during both beta and launch.
“While ‘Update Requires Restart’ isn’t disappearing completely, the goal is simple: fewer required restarts and fewer interruptions between you and your next match,” the developer said.
The first leg of the Modern Warfare 4 beta begins tomorrow, 21st August, immediately following the conclusion of Call of Duty: Next, the live event where much of the beta’s maps and modes will be shown. Pre-loading kicks off today at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm BST. If you’re on PC, make sure to enable TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, as they’re both required to play.
