Monster Hunter Wilds’ listless performance and frame gen misuse plant an oversized axe in the carapace of good PC tech - Related to series, confirm, amd, misuse, oversized

Monster Hunter Wilds’ listless performance and frame gen misuse plant an oversized axe in the carapace of good PC tech

In hindsight, we probably should have taken Monster Hunter Wilds’ earlier benchmark tool release as more of a warning. The actual game is every bit the graphics card torture device that standalone tool suggested it might be, and while it doesn’t make DLSS 3/FSR 3 frame generation mandatory per se, it clearly intends to misappropriate these functions, forcing them to act as performance crutches they were never designed as.

What makes this particularly headshakey is that Wilds’ PC version is, initially, quite sympathetic to the format: besides a full set of DLSS/FSR/XeSS upscalers, an unlocked framerate option, Nvidia Reflex support and the like, its thirty-odd individual quality options hint at the finest of fine-tuning possibilities. Yet these, too, aren’t really fit for purpose, with only minor differences in how the highest and lowest settings perform.

More on that below – never let useless settings get in the way of a good settings guide, as grandpappy used to say. First, though, let’s remind ourselves our Wilds’ in recent times lowered system requirements, and whether they fare more effective in the game proper than they did in the benchmark tool.

Monster Hunter Wilds system requirements and PC performance.

No! They don’t! The official specs are still listing the GeForce GTX 1660 and Radeon RX 5500 XT as entry-level GPUs, and while I didn’t have either of these available to test, I did try the roughly-as-powerful GTX 1070, and the highest in-game average I could get out of it – at 1080p with the Lowest preset and FSR 3 on Ultra Performance – was 26fps. And that’s with both a much lower upscaling quality than what the specs suggest (Upscaling from 720p to 1080p means Quality mode; Ultra Performance upscales from just 640x360), as well as the overpowered Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU I’d left in the test rig.

In fact, it took a GTX 1080 Ti to reach a stable-ish 30fps at 1080p, and that was still with Lowest settings and Performance-level FSR 3. A GTX 1080 Ti! For 30fps! With minimum settings! I’m sorry but the the only way a GTX 1660 is pulling 30fps here is if you’re watching a cutscene, or have jerry-rigged an Apple Watch screen to act as your primary gaming monitor.

I’m still going to replicate the requirements here, partly because I’m a slave to formatting convention and partly because other individual aspects of them (the RAM requirement, SSD space etc.) do appear more accurate. Don’t trust the GPU listings, mind.

Windows 10/11 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i5-10400 / Intel Core i3-12100 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600.

Intel Core i5-10400 / Intel Core i3-12100 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600 RAM: 16GB.

16GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 / AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT, allegedly.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 / AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT, allegedly DirectX: Version 12.

Monster Hunter Wilds recommended PC specs.

Windows 10/11 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i5-10400 / Intel Core i3-12100 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600.

Intel Core i5-10400 / Intel Core i3-12100 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600 RAM: 16GB.

16GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super / AMD Radeon RX 6600.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super / AMD Radeon RX 6600 DirectX: Version 12.

Do note that 75GB doesn’t include the High Resolution Texture Pack, which is a separate download. And, also, probably not worth your consideration – it doubles the size of Wilds’ installation footprint, hurts performance even more, and has an outrageous 16GB VRAM requirement of its own, in exchange for textures that don’t look dramatically more effective than the base game’s High quality equivalents even at 4K. Except where mentioned, all forthcoming test results don’t include it.

Also, the recommended specs apparently only target 60fps when frame generation is enabled – so even if they’re a lot more accurate than the minimum specs, you’re still only looking at 30fps' worth of 'real' frames. As previously moaned about when the benchmark tool launched, trying to cover up performance deficiencies with frame gen makes even less sense than doing it with upscaling, largely owing to how frame gen – whether it’s based on DLSS or FSR – introduces a tangible heap of input lag. This isn’t so much of a problem when the game is already running at, say, 60fps or above, as latency will start off low thanks to the abundance of frames making it faster for the game to reflect your inputs. Here, you could slap on frame gen to get up to 120fps or so, and while it will still feel more like 60fps – generated frames don’t have access to input data and thus can’t lower the lag, only increase it – it will still have a decent amount of control responsiveness to go with the visual smoothness.

Applying frame gen when you’re struggling to nail down 30fps, on the other hand, is a recipe for making it feel even more gloopy. Wilds wants you to enable what might look like free frames, and marvel at the slickness of its (admittedly excellent) animation work, but on most PCs it won’t let you build up enough of a stockpile of traditionally rendered frames to absorb the latency impact. Frame gen is supposed to be a luxury, not a load-bearer.

Saddened by this wanton misuse, as well as the struggle of the entire GeForce GTX lineup, I went in search of some graphics cards that could handle Wilds at 1080p. My usual budget go-tos, the Intel Arc B580 and GeForce RTX 4060, produced mixed results. The RTX 4060 did produce a decent 42fps on native Ultra, rising to 50fps with DLSS on Quality, though the Arc B580 could only average 45fps in the field with a combination of High settings and FSR on Quality mode. Worse, artefacting on the Arc occasionally filled the sky with twitching, stretched-out strips of amok textures; I can’t say this will never happen on Nvidia and AMD cards, though I thankfully haven’t experienced it elsewhere.

The RTX 3070 also found 60fps an elusive beast. At native 1080p, Ultra quality kept it to 46fps, barely any faster than the RTX 4060, and the addition of Quality DLSS only punched it up to 53fps. At 1440p, the RTX 3070’s historic comfort zone, those same, upscaled settings saw a dip to 45fps.

Nay, for true smoothness, you’ll have had to invest big time, ideally in something with a lot more VRAM. The RTX 4070 Ti, which is listed among Wilds’ expanded hardware specs guide as being good for 4K, pumped out 52fps at that rez with Ultra settings and Quality DLSS. 1440p looks like a superior fit, where it scored a far silkier 74fps – enough to justify turning on DLSS 3 frame gen, too, for a 102fps average.

The newer RTX 5070 Ti, if you can get your hands on it, is more successful at plush resolutions. Back at 4K, it produced 62fps with Ultra and DLSS Quality, or 96fps with frame gen. The RTX 5080 makes for a modest upgrade, scoring 70fps and 108fps respectively.

I suppose it’s not the worst thing that good framerates are possible on higher-spec monitors, though you really shouldn’t need to look higher than the likes of the RTX 4060 for buttery 1080p. To say nothing of the weaker yet still widely-used hardware that’s going to miss out entirely – the GTX 1650, currently the fourth most-used GPU among Steam clients? No chance. The Steam Deck? Forget it.

It’s not that there’s just one or two trouble settings causing the malaise, either. Wilds is just unusually demanding in a general sense, sometimes granting a few moments of smoothness in a tight cave or confined tent yet collapsing to a nearly half that performance level once you get out into the wide open world. A kind of anti-Dragon’s Dogma 2, if you will, which is ironic considering these two games share the RE Engine. There’s pretty frequent texture pop-in too, even when simply spinning the camera around to look at something you’ve already seen. Not good enough.

Monster Hunter Wilds best settings guide.

Compounding the issue is that despite Wilds’ graphics settings spanning three different pages, there isn’t actually much help to be had from cutting the quality levels. Some games can run at double or triple the speed when switching form maximum to minimum settings, but at native 1080p, my RTX 4060 only varied from 42fps on Ultra to 56fps on Lowest. That really doesn’t reveal much scope for easy optimisations, though is also less of a surprise once you see how similar the two presets look.

Sure enough, when I tested the individual settings one by one – lowering them to minimum to see which affect performance most keenly – only a handful, excluding upscaling and frame gen, added more than 1fps or 2fps by themselves. Many didn’t affect the framerate at all, which at least confirms that if you’re going to play Monster Hunter Wilds, you can at least leave a big bunch of settings on their highest, with the knowledge that they’re not actively making anything worse.

Here's what I’ve come up with, in terms of a “best” settings combination:

Upscaling/Upscaling mode: DLSS/FSR 3 on Quality.

DLSS/FSR 3 on Quality Ray tracing: High (if supported).

High (if supported) Texture quality: High.

Low Everything else: Ultra preset equivalent.

I should first address the apparent point-blank foot shootery of adding ray tracing effects to a game that I’ve just spent over a dozen paragraphs needling for shoddy performance. Thing is, these ray-traced reflections are such a vast visual upgrade – see below for how they make Wilds’ murky rivers look like something vaguely approaching actual water – that they’re hard to pass up, and yet they’re still limited in scope to the extent that the framerate tax isn’t all that steep. Compared to the Ultra preset’s 42fps, adding High-quality ray tracing only caused a drop to 39fps, a difference you can make up elsewhere just by cutting things like motion blur and the edge-darkening vignette effect.

Besides, chopping and changing quality settings does almost nothing compared to the effect of upscaling. Yes, even at 1080p, this is something you should be adding: Quality DLSS took the RTX 4060 from 42fps to 50fps by itself, and you probably won’t need to go lower than Quality unless you’re trying 4K. Balanced mode, for example, only climbed to 52fps.

Ultimately, these settings produced a 51fps average on the RTX 4060, making for a 21% improvement over native-rez Ultra even with ray tracing. I’m not saying that represents a miraculous fixing of Wilds’ performance shortcomings, but it does at least show that you’re more effective off making manual adjustments instead of relying on presets. If I’d have just stuck with the latter and gone without upscaling, I’d have had to drop all the way down to Low to go faster than with these custom settings.

As for the issue of frame gen, I personally wouldn’t use it when stuck below a solid 60fps – the added latency just interferes too much with the crisp responsiveness I play on PC for. If you intend to play Capcom’s game and enable it regardless, know that my custom settings got 88fps with DLSS 3, and that it certainly did not feel like 88fps.

Finally, a word about the High Resolution Textures Pack. The 16GB VRAM requirement is a lot more on the money than those GPU specs: I tried the pack, rather optimistically, on the 8GB RTX 4060 and it chopped average performance in half. The 16GB RTX 5080 ran it without issue, at the optimal 4K resolution, though again, the resulting fall from 70fps to 59fps represents a performance hit that's just disproportionate to the (very slight) graphical enhancement. Even ray tracing has a smaller impact on frames per second, with an arguably more distinct visual upgrade. I’d save the extra 75GB and leave the pack uninstalled.

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