Technical State of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC is Catastrophic

Capcom's latest title, while a Steam top-ten hit, is facing heavy criticism for its subpar technical performance on PC. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis reveals significant flaws impacting gameplay across various hardware configurations.

Their testing uncovered numerous problems. Shader compilation times are excessively long, ranging from 9 minutes on a high-end 9800X3D system to over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Texture quality is disappointing, even at "High" settings, with noticeable deficiencies observed even on an RTX 4070 with 12GB VRAM. An RTX 4060 at 1440p with balanced DLSS experienced significant frame time spikes at "High" settings.

For GPUs with only 8GB VRAM, Digital Foundry recommends reducing texture quality to "Medium" to alleviate stuttering. However, this compromise still results in less-than-ideal visuals. Rapid camera movements consistently cause frame time spikes, though less severe with slower movements. Crucially, the frame time issues persist even with low-resolution textures.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia attributes these problems to inefficient data streaming, placing undue strain on the GPU during decompression. This is especially problematic for budget GPUs, resulting in jarring frame rate drops. He advises against purchasing the game for 8GB GPU owners and expresses reservations even for more powerful cards like the RTX 4070.

Intel GPUs fare particularly poorly, with the Arc 770 achieving only 15-20 frames per second, accompanied by missing textures and visual artifacts. While high-end systems can partially mitigate these issues, a consistently smooth experience remains elusive. Optimizing settings without significant visual compromises currently proves nearly impossible.