Technical State of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC is Catastrophic

Capcom's latest title, despite achieving impressive online popularity (currently ranking among Steam's top 6 most played games), is facing significant backlash due to its subpar technical performance on PC. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis corroborates these criticisms, revealing a multitude of performance issues.

Their testing uncovered considerable shortcomings. Shader pre-compilation times were excessively long, ranging from 9 minutes on a high-end 9800X3D system to over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Texture quality proved disappointing, even at the "High" setting. Significant frame rate inconsistencies were observed on an RTX 4060 at 1440p with balanced DLSS, a problem that persisted even on a more powerful RTX 4070 (12GB), which still rendered noticeably poor textures.

For GPUs with only 8GB of VRAM, Digital Foundry recommends reducing texture quality to "Medium" to alleviate stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this compromise still results in unsatisfactory visual fidelity. Rapid camera movements consistently triggered noticeable frame drops, though less severe with slower pans. Crucially, the frame time issues remained even with low-quality textures.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia attributes the primary performance bottleneck to inefficient data streaming, placing excessive strain on the GPU during decompression. This heavily impacts budget graphics cards, leading to severe frame rate fluctuations. He strongly advises against purchasing the game for systems with 8GB GPUs and expresses reservations about even higher-end cards like the RTX 4070.

Intel GPUs fared particularly poorly, with the Arc 770 delivering only 15-20 frames per second, accompanied by missing textures and other graphical artifacts. While high-end systems partially mitigate these issues, consistent smooth gameplay remains elusive. Optimizing settings without sacrificing substantial visual quality currently proves nearly impossible.