"Monster Hunter Wilds PC Version Faces Technical Disaster"

Capcom's latest release has surged to the 6th spot among Steam's most-played games, yet it faces significant backlash from the community due to its substandard technical performance. Digital Foundry's comprehensive analysis of the PC version has shed light on the game's numerous shortcomings, leading to widespread disappointment.

The analysis reveals that shader pre-compilation is excessively time-consuming, taking approximately 9 minutes on a system equipped with a 9800X3D processor and over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. 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, significant frame time spikes are evident. Similarly, the RTX 4070, despite its 12 GB of memory, struggles with poor texture rendering.

For users with GPUs boasting 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry recommends downgrading texture quality to "Medium" to reduce stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this compromise does not significantly improve the visual quality. Rapid camera movements still result in noticeable spikes, though these are less severe with slower movements. Even with low-quality textures, the frame time issues persist.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry points out that the game's data streaming issues, which overload the GPU during decompression, are at the heart of these problems. This is particularly detrimental for budget GPUs, leading to sharp frame time spikes. Consequently, he advises against purchasing the game for those with 8 GB GPUs and expresses reservations about its performance on more powerful systems like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is even more dismal on Intel GPUs, with the Arc 770 managing only 15–20 frames per second, alongside missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-performance systems can mitigate some of these issues, the game still struggles to run smoothly. Currently, finding optimized settings that do not severely compromise visual quality is nearly impossible.