Technical State of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC is Catastrophic

Capcom's latest release has soared to the 6th spot among Steam's most-played games, yet it's facing significant backlash from players due to its technical shortcomings. Digital Foundry's thorough analysis of the PC version has confirmed these concerns, highlighting a series of disappointing performance issues.

One major problem identified is the lengthy shader pre-compilation time, which can take up to 9 minutes on a high-end 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 subpar. For instance, on a PC with an RTX 4060 running at 1440p resolution with balanced DLSS settings, the game experiences significant frame time spikes. Similarly, on a more powerful RTX 4070 with 12 GB of memory, the textures appear extremely poor.

For users with GPUs boasting 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry recommends reducing the texture quality to "Medium" to lessen stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this adjustment still leaves the visual quality lacking. Quick camera movements trigger noticeable spikes, though these are somewhat mitigated with slower movements. Even with lower texture settings, the frame time issues persist.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry points to data streaming as the core issue, overloading the GPU during decompression. This problem is especially severe for budget graphics cards, resulting in sharp frame time spikes. He advises against purchasing the game for those with 8 GB GPUs and expresses reservations about its suitability even for more advanced setups like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is particularly dismal on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for example, struggles to deliver just 15-20 frames per second, marred by missing textures and other visual artifacts. While some of these issues can be alleviated on high-end systems, the game still doesn't run smoothly overall. Currently, finding optimized settings is challenging, as any adjustments inevitably compromise visual quality significantly.