Technical State of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC is Catastrophic

Capcom's latest release has been making waves online, achieving the 6th spot among Steam's most-played titles. However, the game has faced significant backlash from users on Valve's platform due to its substandard technical performance. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis of the PC version further corroborates these complaints, highlighting a series of disappointing technical shortcomings.

Digital Foundry's investigation revealed that the game struggles with shader pre-compilation, requiring approximately 9 minutes on a system equipped with a 9800X3D processor, and over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Even when set to "High" graphics settings, the texture quality remains disappointingly low. For instance, on a PC with an RTX 4060 running at 1440p resolution with balanced DLSS settings, there are significant frame time spikes. Similarly, on a more robust RTX 4070 with 12 GB of memory, the textures still appear notably poor.

For users with GPUs featuring 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry recommends downgrading the texture quality to "Medium" to reduce stuttering and frame time spikes. Despite this adjustment, the visual quality remains subpar. Quick camera movements exacerbate these issues, though slower movements mitigate the problem to some extent. Even with reduced texture settings, frame time issues persist.

Alex Battaglia of Digital Foundry points to data streaming as the core issue, which places excessive strain on the GPU during decompression. This problem is especially severe for budget graphics cards, leading to pronounced frame time spikes. Consequently, Battaglia advises against purchasing the game for those with 8 GB GPUs and expresses reservations about its performance even on more powerful systems like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is particularly dismal on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for example, manages only 15–20 frames per second, accompanied by missing textures and other visual glitches. While high-performance systems can somewhat alleviate these issues, the game still fails to run smoothly overall. Currently, finding optimized settings that don't compromise visual quality significantly is nearly impossible.