Digital Foundry Explains Monster Hunter Wilds’ PC Performance Issues

As we reported, Monster Hunter Wilds is the biggest launch on Steam so far, going past one million concurrent players over the weekend. However, that came with terrible user Steam reviews, as players noticed many technical issues.

As it turns out, in spite of its high MetaCritic scores, there were reviewers who noticed Monster Hunter Wilds’ performance issues. Digital Foundry had to release their analysis a few days late, but they do have an explanation of what exactly is broken for Monster Hunter Wilds on PC, and what they recommend for PC players.

Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia corroborates claims from Steam users that there are optimization issues. In particular, he found two things:

Very low quality textures are coming out regardless of performance setting. At high performance setting, Battaglia compared them to PlayStation 3 textures. At medium settings, he then compared them to 2000s era textures. That would be the era of the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, although Battaglia could also be alluding to the state of PC graphics at that time.

The other issue is that when Battaglia rotated the camera on high performance settings, the camera would suddenly start to stutter. Curiously, when he chooses to pan the camera slowly, there is no observable frame stutter. The issue also does not show up if you lower the performance setting.

While he has some theories on why this camera stutter is happening, the bottomline is it’s unacceptable. And really, even if the stuttering issue is resolved by lowering the framerate, you would be compromising too much graphics wise by choosing this setting.

Battaglia also noticed that the game recommends you use frame generation by default, even for computers that aren’t powerful enough to use the technology. That’s easily disabled, but he surmises this was a red flag that Capcom wasn’t able to optimize the game on time.

In the end, Battaglia recommends that PC gamers with a GPU with 8 GB VRAM, and lower specs overall, don’t purchase or play Monster Hunter Wilds. They will just join the number of Steam users who indicated their unhappiness with the performance in those user reviews.

Subsequently, while PC users with higher level specs will be able to force the game to run well, they will still experience those poor textures. Battaglia’s recommendation not to buy or play the game now comes with the expectation that Capcom will eventually fix these issues, making Monster Hunter Wilds worth playing on PC in time.

While Cacpom likely already had monster sales for Monster Hunter Wilds, it’s now on them to address these issues in a timely manner to keep momentum going. You can watch the video version of Battaglia’s analysis below.