Freezes for seconds

WARDOGS freezes for 2 to 15 seconds, then carries on

Published 1 Nov 2026Data as of Season 2 · 15 Oct 2026

This one is not your machine

A known Season 2 problem with no patch or developer reply yet. The fix players report most is unplugging USB sound cards and monitor USB hubs. The -nogpucrashdebugging launch option helps some players and not others. If you fly, use hover so a freeze does not take the helicopter down.

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What you see

The picture locks for anywhere from 2 to 15 seconds, sometimes with the sound, and then the game carries on. It does not crash or disconnect. Whatever you were pressing keeps going during the freeze, so you jump forward when it ends, and a helicopter or truck can be in the ground before you see it. Many players say it started with Season 2.

Also reported as: freezes for a few seconds · game freezes then continues · freeze 10 seconds · stutter in helicopter · helicopter freeze · input desync · random freeze · hitching · stuttering since season 2

What to do instead

The cause is not on your machine, so reinstalling and verifying will not reach it. These are the things that actually help while it lasts.

01 Unplug USB sound cards and monitor USB hubs
Reported
The fix with the clearest result. On r/WarDogs a player removed a USB sound card and the USB hub built into their monitor, plugged keyboard, mouse and headset straight into the PC, and says it "fixed the issue for me". They repeated it in a second thread, where another player said a faulty USB device had caused the same thing for someone else. Try it before anything else.
02 Try the -nogpucrashdebugging launch option
Reported
In Steam, right-click WARDOGS, Properties, and add -nogpucrashdebugging under Launch Options. Results are mixed. One player who froze while flying says it "works a lot better now"; another says it "did not help", and the detailed Steam report already had it set. It costs nothing to try, and you can remove it again.
03 Turn off overlays
Reported
Steam, Discord, Nvidia and FPS-counter overlays. One player says turning off the Steam overlay "worked amazingly" in Season 1, but the freezes came back with Season 2, so treat this as a partial fix at best.
04 Repair Elytra anti-cheat and restart the PC
Reported
One player says this "worked well for me". The player who asked had already repaired and reinstalled it with "no luck". WARDOGS uses Elytra anti-cheat: run Elytra-Setup.exe as administrator, choose Repair, then restart Windows, not just the game.
05 If you fly, hover before you look away from the controls
Reported
This does not stop the freeze, but it stops it killing you. One pilot says the 10-second freezes only crash the helicopter when they are not using hover autopilot. Several players say they now avoid flying, or carrying teammates, because a freeze can wipe a full squad.
06 Do not reinstall Windows for this
Reported
The most detailed report, on Steam, already tried a clean Windows install, a DDU driver reinstall on two Nvidia versions, every graphics preset from Potato to Ultra, and moving the game between two NVMe drives. None of it helped. Their CPU and GPU usage drop to almost zero during the freeze, and temperatures are normal. That points away from your PC's settings.

Did this fix it for you?

Notes from other players who hit this code. Say what worked, what did not, and which region you are in — a fix that only works in one place is worth knowing about. Best-rated first, and there is no time limit: an answer from the first beta is still an answer.

No comments yet. Be the first to say whether this worked.

The freeze is easy to tell apart from a crash. The game stops for a few seconds, then picks up as if nothing happened. The problem is that your input does not stop. A player on Reddit who froze for 5 to 15 seconds says that if they were holding W, their character teleports forward afterwards, "even if I let go of the key during the freeze". In a helicopter, the same thing means a nosedive or a spin you cannot recover from.

Who is getting it?

Players on a wide range of hardware, mostly since Season 2 (Reported). The Steam report is on a Ryzen 9 9950X3D and an RTX 5070 Ti, and says it never happened in Season 1. On r/WarDogs, Random freeze (29 comments, from 20 October) describes one freeze per session, usually 45 to 60 minutes in. Several replies there say it began with Season 2, including one on a 9800X3D and RTX 5070 Ti, and one says it also hits logistics trucks.

It shows up most in the air. Threads titled Crazy 10+ second stutters in helicopters and Game freezes while flying? describe the same thing, and one pilot says it never happens to them on foot. That fits a loading problem when the map streams in fast, which one commenter suggests. We cannot confirm it, and Bulkhead has not said what causes it.

Is Bulkhead fixing it?

Not that it has said. None of the threads above has a developer reply, and no patch note mentions freezes or input desync. The Steam report has no replies yet. When a hotfix names it, this page will say so. If the whole server seems to hang for everyone at once, that is a different problem; check the status page.

Not this freeze?

A short hitch every time you open the inventory or a vendor, with FSR on. Players fixed that one by turning off Character Render in Settings > Interface. The thread has several players saying it worked. On AMD, make sure FSR is set the same way in the game and in the AMD app.
Stutter every one to five seconds on an Intel Arc card. Intel has an official article on WARDOGS for the Arc B580. It says the -nogpucrashdebugging launch option fixes it, and driver 32.0.101.8993 or newer is the permanent fix (Confirmed).
The freeze ends in a crash, a black screen or a driver reset. That is a GPU driver timeout: LiveKernelEvent 141.
Your keys stop working after you press Enter, and the picture keeps moving. That is the chat bug, not a freeze.

Source

Adealia, "Severe Client Freeze (2-15s) with Input Desync", WARDOGS Steam Discussions, 1 November 2026 ↗