Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) has seen an unprecedented resurgence based mostly on the Steam Spring Sale price of $5.99. It's seen the platform's previous high player counts left in the dust, peaking at over 60,000 this past weekend.
Times have changed since the game launched, though, and hardware has come on a few generations since. When Modern Warfare (2019) first hit the market, NVIDIA was on the RTX 20 series, its first-gen ray tracing-capable GPUs.
We're now on the RTX 50 series, and many jumping back into Modern Warfare (2019) on more modern hardware are seeing graphics issues. I'm one of them. No matter what combination of settings I tried with my RTX 5090, it was all blocky and distracting and looked horrible. Turns out if you're in the same boat, your NVIDIA driver is probably to blame.
A solid hat tip to this old Reddit thread I found while investigating the problem, which has been resurrected in recent days along with the game.
In short, if you're running an older NVIDIA driver on your RTX 50 series, it's likely this could be what's causing the blockiness in Modern Warfare (2019). I updated to the latest release, 575.79, and by magic, everything is fine again.
So, if you're on an older driver and Modern Warfare (2019) looks like hell, go ahead and update, and it should fix the problem. It's best to make sure you do a clean installation, too, which you can do either from the NVIDIA app or by using the Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU). This will completely remove the old driver first before installing the new one.
Modern Warfare (2019) is, like basically every Call of Duty game, divisive. Many players hold it in high regard, others less so. I originally fell into the latter, and I'm not afraid to say I've enjoyed playing it more this time around than back in 2019/2020.
My experience was spoiled by the graphics issues, but nothing in-game seemed to help fix it fully. So if you're in the same position I was, go ahead and get the newest NVIDIA driver, and you'll be back having a blast in no time.
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