Cold War players report severe stuttering issues since Season 5 update

Liam Mackay
Black Ops Cold War Season 5 stuttering issues

Black Ops Cold War players have reported that their game has been freezing and stuttering since the Season 5 update, even on high-end PCs.

Cold War Season 5 introduced the TEC-9 and EM2, as well as several other exciting additions. However, it appears that several players have been experiencing severe stuttering problems in Season 5.

Stuttering, or micro-stuttering, causes the game to freeze for a fraction of a second. This will often cause you to lose your gunfight, leading to a stressful experience. This is even affecting players on high-end hardware, but a temporary fix appears to have been found.

Demolition black ops cold war Season 5

Reddit user polyh3dron posted to the Cold War subreddit that they are “experiencing micro stutters during gameplay on PC.” In the 15-second clip that accompanies the post, we can see the game froze and stuttered several times with the FPS dropping significantly.

The OP confirmed that they’re running a top-end PC with some of the most powerful hardware available, so it’s unlikely that their rig is struggling to handle the game. They also said they have checked their background tasks and couldn’t find anything “choking” the system.

Many others echoed the same issue. User kippa said that since the release of Season 5, they’re getting the “same thing all over the place,” but also seeing a “freeze before respawn.” Several others confirmed their game would freeze before respawning, leading to a helpless spawn death.

Some users even reported the same issue on PS4 and Xbox Series X.

How to fix Cold War stuttering issues

Kitsune black ops cold war season 5

polyh3dron said that they tried out several methods to fix the issue, such as disabling RAM overclocking and disabling Gear Down Mode. However, they said that it didn’t fix anything.

Instead, they found that disabling all Ray Tracing settings appears to have fixed the issue. So if you have Ray Tracing enabled and are experiencing stuttering, it could be worth turning the setting off.

Here’s how to turn off Ray Tracing:

  1. Launch Black Ops Cold War
  2. Open up ‘Settings’
  3. Select the ‘Graphics’ tab
  4. Scroll down to ‘Ray Tracing’
  5. Switch all Ray Tracing settings to ‘Disabled’
TEC-9 in Black Ops Cold War Season 5

If you don’t have the Ray Tracing setting enabled and are still experiencing stuttering, you may need to wait for Treyarch to respond to the issue.

While Treyarch hasn’t addressed this issue directly, they have a card on their Trello board of ‘Global Known Issues’ for Crashing and Stability problems. The card is marked as ‘investigating’ and they encourage players to report bugs and other issues so they can be addressed.

You can also check out the best PC settings for Black Ops Cold War, and how to fix low FPS issues in Warzone, many of which translate over to Cold War.

Image Credit: Activision

About The Author

Liam is CharlieIntel's Editor who focuses on Call of Duty but also plays lots of fantasy RPGs or anything else in his massive gaming backlog. After graduating in Journalism from Edinburgh Napier University, Liam freelanced in games journalism before joining CharlieIntel in November 2020. You can contact Liam at [email protected].