"Monster Hunter Wilds PC Performance in Crisis"

Capcom's latest release has achieved impressive online engagement, securing the 6th position among Steam's most-played games. However, the game has faced significant criticism from the community on Valve's platform, primarily due to its poor technical performance. This sentiment is echoed by Digital Foundry, who have conducted an in-depth analysis of the game's PC version and highlighted numerous issues.

Digital Foundry's investigation reveals that the game's shader pre-compilation process is excessively long, taking approximately 9 minutes on a system equipped with a 9800X3D processor, and over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Moreover, the texture quality remains disappointingly low even when set to "High" graphics settings. On a PC with an RTX 4060 running at 1440p resolution with "High" settings and balanced DLSS, users experience significant frame time spikes. Similarly, on a more powerful RTX 4070 with 12 GB of memory, the textures appear notably substandard.

For those with GPUs limited to 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry suggests reducing texture quality to "Medium" to mitigate stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this adjustment still results in unsatisfactory visual quality. Rapid camera movements continue to cause noticeable spikes, although these are less severe with slower movements. Even with reduced texture settings, the frame time issues persist.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry attributes these problems to inefficient data streaming, which places an undue burden on the GPU during decompression. This issue is particularly problematic for budget graphics cards, leading to sharp frame time spikes. Consequently, he advises against purchasing the game for users with 8 GB GPUs and expresses reservations about recommending it even for those with more powerful setups like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is especially dismal on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for instance, struggles to maintain 15–20 frames per second, alongside issues with missing textures and other visual anomalies. While high-performance systems can partially alleviate these problems, achieving smooth gameplay remains challenging. At present, finding optimized settings that do not compromise visual quality significantly is nearly impossible.