Monster Hunter Wilds fixes DLC bug, greatly reduces FPS drops, and runs at 30 FPS on Steam Deck

Monster Hunter Wilds has been the subject of heavy criticism regarding its performance since its launch, but its developers at Capcom have long since promised major performance improvements to be made across platforms, including a PC-specific performance patch that just released.

This PC-exclusive patch for Wilds has not only fixed the infamous DLC check bug that was drastically slowing down the game's performance in specific areas, but also made an assortment of other CPU and GPU optimizations. In extreme cases, some users reporting up to twice the framerate without the need to use Frame Generation, thanks to more stable all-around performance and an assortment of new graphics options. More balanced testing results with the same or similar settings is seeing performance mostly similar to Title Update 4 on average, but the real improvements have been to minimum FPS, with dips being greatly mitigated and framerate being much more stable.

Per Daniel Owen's testing, minimum FPS has improved by 8% since Title Update 4 and a whopping 20% since Title Update 3. The reason why performance has been impacted in this way specifically seems to be optimizations made to shader compilation and texture streaming. Alongside the bug fix, this has resulted in Wilds having dramatically lower CPU performance and GPU VRAM demands, which were two major pain points for the PC version.

Performance has now evened out to the extent that the game can even be considered roughly playable at ~30 FPS, no Frame Generation needed, on Steam Deck and its tier of handheld PCs. Not only is this great news for handheld PC players who were formerly being pushed out of even an entry-level Wilds experience, it's good news for owners of entry-level and mid-range PC hardware in general who were previously pushed away by Wilds' system requirements. With another major performance update on the way—a cross-platform one, no less—the future looks bright for Monster Hunter Wilds players.

Performance has now evened out to the extent that the game can even be considered roughly playable at ~30 FPS, no Frame Generation needed, on Steam Deck and its tier of handheld PCs, at least with the help of FSR or XeSS upscaling. Not only is this great news for handheld PC players who were formerly being pushed out of even an entry-level Wilds experience, it's good news for owners of entry-level and mid-range PC hardware in general who were previously pushed away by Wilds' system requirements. With another major performance update on the way—a cross-platform one, no less—the future looks bright for Monster Hunter Wilds players. Maybe that Switch 2 port will end up performing well—after all, Switch 2 is much stronger than Steam Deck.