Monster Hunter Wilds isn’t perfect, but it is excellent—I spent about twelve hours playing it yesterday. It’s a new main-line Monster Hunter game, with all that entails, including peak development expenditure from CAPCOM on one of its biggest properties to produce a detailed, high-effort monster slaying experience. Despite that, the game is currently sitting at “Mixed” reviews on Steam, and that’s largely down to its PC performance.
Some people who meet the system requirements are still having major issues, though, like the game failing to start properly, or simply presenting a black screen. For those people, CAPCOM has just published a list of troubleshooting tips that could help resolve those sorts of problems. Some of the tips are pretty standard: check the minimum requirements, update your video drivers, and check for Windows updates.
Some of the tips are less standard: do a clean install of your graphics driver, manually update DirectX (what?), or try adding the game’s folders to your anti-virus exclusion list. Capcom also recommends adding the files and folders for Steam to your anti-virus exclusion list, and further recommends running Steam as an administrator. If that still doesn’t help, CAPCOM says “try logging in to your PC as an administrator and running the game’s executable file (MonsterHunterWilds.exe). Uh, okay Capcom.
None of this is likely to break anything and it’s worth a try if you can’t get the game running. Given its intense video RAM usage, we also recommend users to close any unnecessary background applications, particularly browsers and other games, and we also recommend disabling any extra overlays that you’re not using. This includes the Steam overlay (can be disabled per-game), the Discord overlay, TeamSpeak/Overwolf, RTSS performance monitoring, and any other overlays that you might have running. We found that this helped to reduce stuttering considerably in our testing. You can still use Discord in the background without the overlay.
With that said, if you’re just having performance problems with the game, our #1, #2, and #3 tips are to simply disable ray-tracing, disable frame generation, and crank the texture quality setting down a notch. Most performance problems in this game are going to come down to video memory usage; ray-tracing and frame generation both require considerable additional VRAM, and the only use for ray-tracing in this game is for reflections, so just drop it. Meanwhile, lowering texture quality by a notch will uglify the game a bit, but it will help with performance more than you think, especially on 8GB GPUs.
You can also try lowering the upscaling preset by a notch, although we might recommend against this for people using FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling. Instead, you can try moving over to XeSS, which will look much better than FSR at lower presets, even on AMD and older NVIDIA GPUs, at a slight (3-4 FPS) performance hit. Finally, if nothing else helps, you can simply lower the resolution in-game and that will reduce both VRAM usage and GPU load. If you’re CPU-limited, though, your only real salvation is going to be to drop the draw distance.
Let us know what you think of Monster Hunter Wilds so far in the comments, especially if you have any other performance-boosting tips!