Monster Hunter Wilds PC Optimization: Best Settings + Benchmarks

Monster Hunter Wilds is set to launch in two weeks. Despite being Capcom’s largest AAA release, the PC port’s state is dire, requiring upscaling and frame generation for playable frame rates. The developers have released a benchmarking application, allowing players to gauge the systems’ readiness. Unfortunately, the performance is dismal, and tweaking the graphics settings barely makes a difference. Here’s our optimization guide for Monster Hunter Wilds aimed at maximizing performance across different PCs.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

• Enable Resizable BAR.
• Turn on Game Mode.
• Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
• Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
• Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
• Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
• Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
• Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Monster Hunter Wilds: PC Specs

Monster Hunter Wilds: Graphics & Resolution Scaling

Monster Hunter Wilds averages less than 60 FPS at 4K “Ultra” on the GeForce RTX 4090. Switching to 1440p increases the framerate to 78 FPS, while 1080p produces 89 FPS. This is without ray tracing. Pretty dismal scaling, but that’s just the start.

Test Setup

• CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
• Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
• Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
• Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.

Monster Hunter Wilds pairs the five graphics presets with different upscaling presets: quality mode with ultra, balanced with high, performance with medium, and ultra performance with low/very low. That’s unfair as it adjusts the internal resolution, obscuring the performance scaling across the graphics presets.

Without upscaling, we get the below numbers. Switching from the ultra to medium quality preset grants less than an 8% FPS boost. Scaling down to the lowest preset further improves performance by 15%. Overall, the highest and lowest presets differ by a mere 23%. The only real difference is felt when switching from medium to low (15%).

• Ultra to high reduces the geometric detail (particularly rocks and terrain) and shadow resolution.
  • Distant shadows are less detailed, and shadow distance is reduced.
• High to medium follows a marked reduction in shadow quality, producing blurry/blocky silhouettes.
  • Diffuse lighting is disabled, and vegetation quality is scaled down.
  • Geometric detail is further reduced.
• Low disables ambient occlusion and reduces shadow quality.
  • Vegetation and fog detail are reduced, and the lack of proper lighting makes the scene bland and one-dimensional.
• Very Low makes shadows almost non-existent, further reducing geometric detail.
  • The fog density and vegetation are scaled down.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ray Tracing

Monster Hunter Wilds features ray-traced reflections, mainly implemented on water bodies and mirrory/metallic surfaces. Although the usage is scarce, we see a 7-8% performance drop upon enabling it at any quality level. This is in a scene without any specular reflections.

Switching between the three quality levels does nothing for performance. The game uses ray-traced reflections with certain non-glossy surfaces, which is strange as it doesn’t add much to the scene.

Graphics Settings Impacting Performance (>1.5%)

Monster Hunter Wilds features about two dozen graphics settings, but none impact performance by more than 2% (individually). The below settings grant a 1.5-2% FPS uplift when reduced to the lowest. These include render distance, mesh quality (geometric detail), ambient occlusion, shadow quality, ambient light (diffuse lighting), volumetric fog, and screen space reflections.

The rest of the settings hardly impact the game’s performance (less than 1.5%). These include sky quality, sub-surface scattering, shadow distance, grass/tree quality, Variable Rate Shading, surface quality (tessellation), fur quality, grass/tree sway, distant shadow quality, contact shadows, and sand/snow quality.

Upscaling & Frame Generation

As you might have already guessed, upscaling and frame generation are the only ways to improve performance meaningfully. Unfortunately, even upscaling has limited benefits in Monster Hunts Wilds. DLSS quality mode grants a 23% FPS boost, while performance mode extends it to 37%.

With ray tracing, the result is slightly lower: An average of 71.5 FPS with performance and 64 FPS with quality upscaling mode. Frame generation grants a massive 64% boost, buoying the RTX 4090 to 82 FPS with every setting (including ray tracing) maxed out.

Combining upscaling and frame generation nets an average of 97 FPS with quality and 110 FPS with performance mode. The lows are consistent, with the 1% FPS ranging between 70-80 FPS.

Unfortunately, RTX 30/20 and Radeon users relying on AMD’s FSR 3-based frame generation might face frame pacing, as the technology doesn’t produce the best results with input frame rates of less than 60 FPS.

Monster Hunter Wilds: VRAM Usage

Exceeding the VRAM requirements results in partially loaded textures rather than stutters. If you experience this, recompile the game’s shaders, even at lower quality settings.

Traditionally, game assets are loaded by the CPU from the storage (SSD or HDD) to the RAM (main memory). From there, they’re sent to the GPU VRAM and consumed by the graphics engine.

This can lead to prolonged load times as the CPU’s memory bandwidth is much lower than the GPU’s. Furthermore, the CPU has to decompress the assets before sending them to the GPU, adding to the overhead.

Direct Storage (marketed by NVIDIA as RTX IO) allows the GPU to access game assets directly from the SSD. The process is much faster as GPUs are built for parallel workloads with high memory bandwidths.

CPU overhead is reduced as it no longer needs to spend precious cycles on decompression. Fixed-function decompression hardware on modern GPUs allows the use of highly compressed assets and smaller buffer sizes.

Direct Storage allows swapping of textures in and out of memory in real time. This reduces the graphics memory budget required for high-fidelity assets. It also eliminates the need for load screens when traversing different areas. It has the following requirements:

• Windows 11 or Windows 10 (Version 1909 or later)
  • Windows 11 is preferred since it has further optimizations.
• An NVMe SSD (PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 recommended)
  • SATA SSDs don’t benefit as much.
  • PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 SSDs offer even better speeds.
• A DirectX 12 GPU with Shader Model 6.0+
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 series or newer
  • AMD Radeon RX 6000 series or newer

This might lead to stuttering and frame-pacing issues on lower-end GPUs with 8 GB VRAM buffers. Since the game uses Direct Storage, using an NVMe SSD might alleviate it.

Monster Hunter Wilds: CPU Bottlenecks

Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t show any notable CPU bottlenecks, with PresentMon reporting a GPU-Busy deviation of under 5% at 1080p “Ultra” with quality upscaling.

Optimized Settings for Monster Hunter Wilds

Monster Hunter Wilds: Best Settings for Low-end PC

Monster Hunter Wilds is unplayable on lower-end hardware without frame generation. Fortunately, the FSR 3 implementation performs well with minimal frame pacing issues. We recorded 45 FPS 1% lows at the ultra-quality preset with balanced upscaling. Here’s our add-on guide for 60-class GPUs.