Monster Hunter Wilds PC Performance Disaster Unveiled

Capcom's latest release has been making waves online, securing the 6th spot among Steam's most-played titles. However, the game has not been immune to criticism, particularly regarding its technical performance, which has led to a less favorable rating on Valve's platform. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis of the PC version further corroborates these concerns, highlighting a series of disappointing technical issues.

The analysis reveals that shader pre-compilation is excessively time-consuming, taking approximately 9 minutes on a system equipped with a 9800X3D processor and over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Moreover, texture quality remains substandard, even when set to "High" graphics settings. For instance, on a PC with an RTX 4060, configured at "High" settings and 1440p resolution with balanced DLSS, significant frame time spikes are observed. Even with a more robust RTX 4070 featuring 12 GB of memory, the textures are disappointingly poor.

For users with GPUs possessing 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry recommends lowering texture quality to "Medium" to reduce stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this compromise still results in unsatisfactory visual quality. Rapid camera movements continue to trigger noticeable spikes, although these are less severe with slower camera movements. Unfortunately, even with lower texture settings, frame time issues persist.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry points to data streaming as the core problem, causing excessive GPU load during decompression. This issue is particularly detrimental for budget graphics cards, leading to sharp frame time spikes. As a result, Battaglia advises against purchasing the game for those with 8 GB GPUs and expresses caution about using even more powerful solutions like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is notably worse on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for example, struggles to maintain 15–20 frames per second and suffers from missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-performance systems can mitigate some of these issues, the game still fails to run smoothly consistently. Currently, finding optimized settings is a challenging task, often leading to a significant degradation in visual quality.