The fact thatMonster Hunter Wildsis coming out on PC day and date with all the other platforms is excellent news, but there’s a hefty caveat in place. Capcom published the full and fairly detailed list of system requirements, and they spell bad news for owners of regular, non-superpowered PCs.
More specifically, everything points toWildsbeing effectively a repeat of what’s gone down with Capcom’s previous RE Engine open-world RPG,Dragon’s Dogma 2. On day one,Dragon’s Dogma 2was an infamously poor performer.Capcom did end up pushing out some performance updatesnot too long ago, but players had to resort to some…questionableactionsto get it to behave. According to the officialMonster Hunter WildsPC hardware requirements, we’re in for something similar with it, too.
It’s either frame-gen or 30 FPS for us regular mortals in Monster Hunter: Wilds
First things first, here are the recommended PC specifications taken verbatim from Steam, as of September 25:
Note the ‘Additional Notes’ bit at the end, in particular. Your RTX 4060 is only going to be able to pull averyhumble 1080p/60 at “Medium” settings, but the real kicker is the fact that it won’t even get a native 60 FPS to begin with. Instead, the game will have to rely onframe generationto reach even 60 FPS.
For those who may be unfamiliar withhow frame generation works in general, the problem with this performance goal is that the technology doesn’t really work all that well at lower frame rates. It is generally recommended for both Nvidia and AMD’s frame generation technologies to be turned on with astable baseline of 60 FPS. Anything below that delivers seriously subpar results with excessive rendering anomalies and reduced input latency. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I want shoddy latency in aMonster Huntergame.
There’s no way for Capcom to pull a miracle and get sub-60 FPS frame generation to work well inMonster Hunter Wilds, so it’s almost guaranteed that the game will be a poor performer across the board. To say nothing of the fact that even the 4060 can’t get a native 60 FPS at 1080P.
So, we’re in for a hell of a ride. IfDragon’s Dogma 2is anything to go by (and it likely is),Monster Hunter Wildsis going to suffer from being heavily CPU-bottlenecked, and there might be no easy fix for that. Stay tuned for performance reviews, I guess!
