Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s PC beta opens today for pre-order customers, three months ahead of the game’s full launch on 23 October, when it arrives simultaneously on PC and consoles. The Modern Warfare 4 beta is notable for including both single-player campaign content and multiplayer maps for the first time, rather than the multiplayer-only tests Call of Duty betas have traditionally run, split across two separate weekends with different access rules for each.
Beta access and dates
Getting in depends on whether you’ve pre-ordered. The early access beta is restricted to pre-order customers and runs from Friday, 21 August at 11am PDT (7pm BST) through Tuesday, 25 August at 10am PDT. A second, open beta follows a week later and is free for anyone to join, running from Friday, 28 August at 10am PDT (6pm BST) through Tuesday, 1 September at 10am PDT. Both windows give players the same slice of content, one campaign mission and a handful of multiplayer maps, so the open beta isn’t a cut-down version of the early one.
- Early access (pre-order required): Friday 21 August, 11am PDT to Tuesday 25 August, 10am PDT
- Open beta (no pre-order needed): Friday 28 August, 10am PDT to Tuesday 1 September, 10am PDT
The shader compiling fix
Alongside the schedule, Infinity Ward and co-developer Beenox used the beta announcement to describe a fix for one of PC gaming’s more tedious rituals. Eurogamer reports the studios say they’ve eliminated the “Compiling Shaders” screen that stalls players before a match starts, the wait that appears whenever a game has to build shader variants for your specific GPU and driver combination. That screen doesn’t only show up on a fresh install; it tends to reappear after a driver update too, which is precisely when players are least willing to sit through it.
If that holds up in the beta, it removes a wait that has nothing to do with your hardware’s actual performance and everything to do with the game doing setup work it used to leave until the worst possible moment: right before you wanted to play. It’s a fix that matters more the more often your driver changes, which is where our own coverage this week overlaps.
Why the timing matters for new GPU owners
We covered AMD’s Radeon RX 9050 4GB driver support landing in Adrenalin 26.8.1 earlier today. A new GPU paired with a new driver is exactly the combination that has historically forced the longest shader compiles, since neither the card nor the driver has any cached compilation to fall back on. Anyone picking up an RX 9050 and jumping straight into the Modern Warfare 4 beta this weekend is, whether they intended it or not, about as good a test case as Infinity Ward and Beenox could ask for, and a useful sign of whether the fix generalises beyond Nvidia and older AMD hardware.
What to watch next
The open beta begins Friday, 28 August at 10am PDT and is free for everyone, regardless of pre-order status. That’s the weekend to check whether the shader fix holds up outside a curated early access population, and whether it still works cleanly on hardware as new as the RX 9050.
