Technical State of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC is Catastrophic

Capcom's latest release is a chart-topper, currently ranking among Steam's most played games. However, its stellar online performance is overshadowed by widespread criticism regarding its technical shortcomings on PC. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis confirms these concerns, painting a bleak picture of the game's current state.

Their findings reveal a multitude of problems. Shader pre-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 disappointingly low, even at the "High" setting. Significant frame time spikes plague gameplay, even on an RTX 4060 at 1440p with DLSS enabled. Surprisingly, even the more powerful RTX 4070 struggles, producing noticeably poor textures.

Owners of GPUs with 8GB of VRAM are advised to reduce texture quality to "Medium" to alleviate stuttering and frame time spikes. Yet, even this compromise fails to deliver satisfactory visual fidelity. Rapid camera movements exacerbate these issues, although slower pans show some improvement. Crucially, the underlying frame time problems persist regardless of texture settings.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia points to inefficient data streaming as the likely culprit, overloading the GPU during decompression. This heavily impacts budget graphics cards, leading to pronounced frame time spikes. He strongly discourages 8GB GPU owners from playing and expresses reservations even about higher-end cards like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is particularly abysmal on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for instance, manages only 15-20 frames per second, accompanied by missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-end systems can partially mitigate some issues, a consistently smooth experience remains elusive. Currently, optimizing settings without sacrificing significant visual quality proves nearly impossible.