How to Fix Warzone Dev Error 5573 (Mid-Match Crash)

By FixMyError · Updated October 14, 2026 · 6 min read

What Dev Error 5573 means

Dev Error 5573 belongs to Call of Duty's long-running family of "Dev Error" crashes, and it has a habit of showing up mid-match: the screen freezes, you get dumped to desktop, and the error box gives you the number 5573 with no explanation. Unlike a clean DirectX crash, it also sometimes just kicks you out of online multiplayer while the game itself stays open, which points away from your graphics card and toward something higher up the stack.

Activision has never published an official definition for 5573, so nearly everything known about it comes from player reports on Reddit and the support forums. The pattern is distinctive. Reports spike in the days after a Warzone or Modern Warfare update. The crash seems linked to merged game content — weapons, operators, and cosmetics pulled in from Black Ops Cold War after the games were tied together. And most tellingly, players who crash repeatedly on their own Activision account can play for hours without a single error on a different account, then crash again the moment they switch back.

Put together, that paints a picture of an account-and-content compatibility bug rather than a broken PC. Your hardware is very likely fine — the trigger is something in your profile data or in specific Cold War-era items interacting badly with the current game build. That is good news, because it means the fixes below are cheap to try and several of them work even though nobody outside Activision knows the true root cause.

Common causes

• Post-update content conflicts: crashes cluster right after game updates, when merged item pools and profile data get re-shuffled.
• Black Ops Cold War items in loadouts: the FFAR and Pellington are the two weapons most often named as triggers, along with Cold War operators.
• Account-side data corruption: the strongest pattern — crashes follow your Activision account to another PC but stop on a different account.
• Display mode conflicts: Fullscreen exclusive mode trips the crash for many players; Windowed mode settles it down.
• Corrupted shader or settings cache: damaged local shaders and settings files that survived an update can keep the error recurring.

How to fix Dev Error 5573 — step by step

Work through these fixes in order. Start with the fast ones before touching your account.

1. Switch the display mode to Windowed. Launch Warzone and open Options, then go to the Graphics tab. Change Display Mode from Fullscreen (or Fullscreen Exclusive) to Windowed, then return to the game. This one is popular because it takes thirty seconds, works on console as well as PC, and has fixed the error for a lot of players outright.
2. Strip Cold War-era items from your loadouts. Open your loadouts and remove any Black Ops Cold War content — the FFAR and the Pellington are the two weapons players blame most often, but to be thorough, swap to Modern Warfare weapons across all loadouts and pick a Modern Warfare operator. Some players also report that removing certain Cold War calling cards and emblems helped. Start a match and see whether the crash is gone.
3. Launch with the -d3d11 command line flag. In Battle.net, click Options, then Game Settings, and check the box for Additional command line arguments for Call of Duty. Type -d3d11 in the text box. This forces the game to run on DirectX 11 instead of DirectX 12, which sidesteps a class of rendering conflicts. Launch the game and test a few matches.
4. Restart shader installation and repair the game. Inside the game, open Game Settings, go to the Graphics tab, and choose Restart Shader Installation, then close the menu. Exit to Battle.net, select Call of Duty, click the gear icon next to Play, and choose Scan and Repair. Let the scan run to completion — it replaces any damaged files from a bad update.
5. Try a different Activision account. Sign out of your current Activision account and play under a different one. This is the workaround with the strongest track record for 5573: if the error never appears on the other account, the trigger is almost certainly in your account data, and you can keep playing there until a future patch cleans up the corruption. If you do not have a second account, this is the step that may justify making one.
6. Reset the user config files. Press Windows + R, type %USERPROFILE%\Documents, and press Enter. Delete the folder named Call Of Duty to reset your in-game settings to defaults — this clears a corrupted config that can keep re-triggering the crash. Relaunch the game; it rebuilds the settings folder cleanly on startup.

Did this fix it? Quick checklist

• You can play multiple full matches with no Dev Error 5573
• No crashes or mid-match disconnects after an update
• The game survives at least one full match on your original account
• Cold War items removed from every loadout during the test

If the error survives steps 1 through 4 but disappears on a second Activision account, the problem is on Activision's side of the fence and only a patch or an account-data reset by support will truly fix your main account. Keep an eye on patch notes after each update, and consider sending Activision Support a ticket describing the account-linked pattern — enough reports of the same signature do get escalated. If the crash happens even on a fresh account, look at your PC basics: update Windows via Settings, then Windows Update, and do a clean reinstall of your GPU driver, since a bad update can aggravate an already-fragile game build.