Monster Hunter Wilds – we can't recommend the PC version

Monster Hunter Wilds makes for a confusing PC release, with staggeringly poor performance on lower-end graphics cards – to the extent that we don’t recommend the game at all on these systems – and relatively meagre visual rewards given the performance requirements. That’s a harsh assessment, but it’s unfortunately a justified one based on the profound performance problems here that must be addressed.

That’s a surprise when our initial impressions of the game on PC are fairly positive. The game uses a long shader compilation step on first launch, taking around six minutes on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and more than 13 minutes on a Ryzen 5 3600. The graphical settings menu is also nicely designed, with fine-grained options, a VRAM metre, component-specific performance implications and preview images for particular settings.

However, there’s some weirdness too. The game prompts you to enable frame generation before it even starts with a pop-up, even on low-end machines where frame generation doesn’t really make sense. (Neither AMD nor Nvidia recommends using frame-gen with a low base frame-rate – 30fps, for example.) If you decline this offer, the game makes sure to tell you that you can turn it on in the settings menu, which as a reviewer paints a poor picture of the game’s potential performance.

After all the pop-ups, like any casual user I used the game’s default detected settings and set DLSS to balanced mode at 1440p on the RTX 4060. Loading up the game presented more issues, with PS3-level texture quality in many shots and many textures that looked like they had loaded incorrectly – one character’s white coat was rendered multi-colour by mosaic artefacts due to poorly configured texture compression.