Monster Hunter Wilds PC Technical Issues: A Disaster

While Capcom's latest release is making waves by ranking 6th among Steam's most-played titles, it's also facing significant backlash from users due to its substandard technical performance. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis of the PC version has shed light on the game's numerous issues, drawing disappointing conclusions about its overall condition.

According to Digital Foundry, the game struggles with several technical problems. 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 remains disappointingly low. On a PC with an RTX 4060, configured to "High" settings at 1440p resolution with balanced DLSS, the game experiences significant frame time spikes. Similarly, on the more powerful RTX 4070 with 12 GB of memory, the textures appear notably poor.

For users with GPUs featuring 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry recommends reducing the texture quality to "Medium" to help mitigate stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this adjustment still results in unsatisfactory visual quality. Rapid camera movements continue to cause noticeable spikes, though these are less severe with slower camera movements. Even with low-quality textures, the frame time issues persist.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry points out that the core issue stems from data streaming, which places an excessive load on the GPU during decompression. This is particularly problematic for budget graphics cards, leading to sharp frame time spikes. As a result, 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 especially dismal on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for example, only manages to deliver 15–20 frames per second, alongside missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-performance systems can partially alleviate these issues, the game still fails to run smoothly. At present, finding optimized settings is nearly impossible without sacrificing significant visual quality.