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 highlights several key problems. Shader pre-compilation times are excessively long, ranging from approximately 9 minutes on a high-end 9800X3D system to over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Texture quality is disappointingly low, even at the "High" setting. Significant frame rate stuttering is observed even on an RTX 4060 at 1440p with balanced DLSS, a problem exacerbated by poor texture quality, even on a more powerful RTX 4070.

Users with 8GB GPUs are advised to reduce texture settings to "Medium" to alleviate stuttering, yet visual fidelity remains underwhelming. Rapid camera movements consistently trigger noticeable frame time spikes, although less severe with slower pans. Crucially, these frame time issues persist regardless of texture quality.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia attributes these performance bottlenecks to inefficient data streaming, placing an undue burden on the GPU during decompression. This is particularly detrimental to budget graphics cards, resulting in severe frame rate inconsistencies. He strongly discourages the purchase for 8GB GPU owners and expresses reservations even for higher-end cards like the RTX 4070.

Intel GPU performance is especially poor, with the Arc 770 achieving only 15-20 frames per second, accompanied by missing textures and other graphical glitches. While high-end systems can partially mitigate these issues, a consistently smooth experience remains elusive. Optimizing settings without sacrificing significant visual quality currently proves nearly impossible.