"Monster Hunter Wilds PC Performance in Crisis"

Capcom's latest release has surged to the 6th spot among Steam's most-played titles, but it's not all praise for the game. Players have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with its technical performance, a sentiment echoed by Digital Foundry's thorough analysis of the PC version.

Digital Foundry's investigation revealed a host of problems plaguing the game. One significant issue is the lengthy shader pre-compilation process, taking around 9 minutes on a system equipped with a 9800X3D processor and over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Additionally, even when set to "High" graphics settings, the texture quality remains disappointingly low. On a PC with an RTX 4060 running at 1440p resolution with balanced DLSS, the game experiences significant frame time spikes. The situation doesn't improve much with the more powerful RTX 4070, where textures continue to appear substandard despite having 12 GB of memory.

For those using GPUs with 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry advises reducing the texture quality to "Medium" to help reduce stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this compromise still leaves players with unsatisfactory visual quality. Quick camera movements exacerbate the problem, causing noticeable spikes, though slower movements mitigate the issue to some extent. Even with low-quality textures, the frame time problems persist.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry points to data streaming as the core issue, putting undue strain on the GPU during decompression. This is especially problematic for budget graphics cards, leading to severe frame time spikes. As a result, he advises against purchasing the game if you own an 8 GB GPU and expresses reservations about its performance on even more powerful setups like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is particularly dire on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for instance, struggles to maintain 15–20 frames per second and suffers from missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-performance systems can somewhat alleviate these issues, the game still doesn't run smoothly across the board. At present, finding optimized settings that don't severely compromise visual quality seems nearly unfeasible.