Monster Hunter Wilds PC Technical Issues: A Disaster

Capcom's latest release has been making waves by securing the 6th spot among Steam's most-played titles, yet it faces significant backlash due to its technical shortcomings. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis of the PC version has shed light on the game's troubling state, drawing conclusions that are far from flattering.

The analysis revealed a host of issues plaguing the game. For instance, shader pre-compilation can take up to 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 is disappointingly low. On a PC with an RTX 4060, running at "High" settings at 1440p resolution with balanced DLSS, there are significant frame time spikes. Surprisingly, even the more powerful RTX 4070 with 12 GB of memory struggles to render textures adequately.

For users with GPUs boasting 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry recommends lowering the texture quality to "Medium" to reduce stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this adjustment still does not yield satisfactory visual quality. Rapid camera movements continue to cause noticeable spikes, though these are less severe with slower movements. Even with reduced texture settings, frame time issues remain a persistent problem.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry points out that the core issue stems from data streaming, which puts an excessive load on the GPU during decompression. This is especially detrimental for budget graphics cards, leading to sharp frame time spikes. Consequently, Battaglia advises against purchasing the game for those with 8 GB GPUs and expresses caution even for users with more powerful setups like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is particularly dismal on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for example, can only manage 15–20 frames per second and is plagued by missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-performance systems can somewhat mitigate these issues, the game still fails to run smoothly. Currently, finding optimized settings is nearly impossible without sacrificing significant visual quality.