Monster Hunter Wilds also moves the series to the RE Engine. Technically, Monster Hunter Rise already did this, but that title was originally intended for the Nintendo Switch and as a result it didn’t really take advantage of Capcom’s “Reach for the Moon” technology. Wilds, on the other hand, is squarely a current-generation title, and the high system requirements left some worrying whether they could run it at all. Let’s take a look:
Chief among many gamers’ concerns when these specs came out was Capcom’s seeming enthusiasm for frame generation, recommending the use of it to reach 60 FPS. Many users were afraid that it would be impossible to reach 60 FPS without using frame generation. Well, we can assure you that you absolutely can reach 60 FPS without frame generation, as long as you have a reasonably powerful machine.
There’s no doubt about it, though. This game is demanding, and you’re going to need a pretty modern system if you want to play it at all. Case in point, we haven’t been able to get it to run with playable performance on any gaming handheld we have, whether AMD or Intel-based. Even turned down to 1280×800 resolution, using upscaling on low settings, the game is simply too demanding. So if you’re a Steam Deck stalwart, stick to Rise.
Rey Dau is a new lightning-themed flying wyvern in Monster Hunter Wilds.
We’ve tested the official Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark on 16 different graphics cards and six different CPUs. Well, we say 16 graphics cards but were only able to get data on 14, and the reason is because the Arc A750 and Arc A580 simply are not up to the task of running this game. Arc Alchemist in particular has major performance problems on Monster Hunter Wilds, which are hopefully fixable with a driver update. In any case, let’s check out those GPU benchmarks.
Monster Hunter Wilds GPU Benchmarks
This first set of tests was performed in 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and 3840×2160 output resolutions. We set the game to the “High” preset, but adjusted upscaling to “Quality” instead of the default “Balanced”, because “Balanced” upscaling looks pretty grimy on everything that isn’t running DLSS4. We also turned on ray tracing, which is not affected by the performance presets. For these tests, ray tracing was on “Low.”
You’ll notice an unusual feature in this chart, and that’s the presence of the small red X characters. Because we’re only reporting average FPS here (as reported by the benchmark itself), we took the pain to mark results that aren’t representative of the real performance. You see, the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark is highly variable in terms of performance within the course of a run, and while a GPU might turn out a 43 FPS average, the minimums could be far below that. So, all of the results marked with the red X are not recommended settings. Also, the “missing” results are “did not finish” results where we canceled the benchmark early because performance was completely unplayable.
Most of our GPUs are able to present a playable performance on High settings. Only the Arc Alchemist GPUs are really not capable of playing the game on High settings, and as we noted, we think that’s a driver bug. The game clearly seems to favor AMD graphics hardware; check out the Radeon RX 7800 XT nipping at the heels of the usually-much-faster GeForce RTX 4080, at least in lower resolutions. The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti puts up a really solid performance, too, barely losing any performance in 1440p and matching the much more power-hungry GeForce RTX 3080. Capcom seemed to suggest that the RTX 4060 Ti would need frame generation to hit 60 FPS in 1440p “High”, but that’s clearly not the case. What about Ultra settings?
That’s a lot of little red X marks. Yep, Ultra settings in this game are ludicrously demanding, as they so often are, but the real problem is the load that this option puts on video RAM. Simply put, cards with 8GB of video RAM need not attempt to run Ultra settings. Despite average frame rates in the 40s or even 50s, 8GB cards from all three vendors stumble badly on Ultra, with major stuttering and horrible performance. Check out this frame-time graph from the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in 1080p Ultra:
Monster Hunter Wilds 1080p “Ultra” frametimes on GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
If you’ve never seen one of these graphs, well, it’s not supposed to look like that. It’s supposed to be a nice flat blue line going all the way across. Instead, what we’re looking at is unbelievably choppy frame times that make the game look like a slideshow. The RTX 4060 Ti has the grunt to run the game at 1440p, but it simply doesn’t have the video RAM, at least in its 8GB incarnation for the Ultra setting. For a contrast, here’s the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395’s integrated Radeon 8060S GPU on the very same settings:
Monster Hunter Wilds “Ultra” 1080p frametimes on Radeon 8060S
Certainly not the most impressive performance, hovering around 50 FPS, but it’s a hell of a lot smoother. This is more demonstrative of what frame-time graphs are supposed to look like. By the way, for the Ultra testing, we also set Ray-Tracing to high, so that workload is included in all of the results here. However, Monster Hunter Wilds appears to only use ray-tracing for reflections, so it doesn’t impact performance much.
We did all of our GPU benchmarking on a Socket AM5 test bed equipped with a 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X CPU and hand-tuned DDR5 memory at 6400 MT/s with CAS latency 30. Of course, we wanted to see how the game scales with CPUs, too, so we tested it on a variety of other machines we had ready to go. The short version is that, even if you have a brand-new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics card, you might be struggling if your CPU isn’t pretty recent, too.
We did CPU performance testing when the original Monster Hunter Wilds beta hit back in November of last year, and at that time the Core Ultra 9 285K was actually getting dunked on by the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and pretty handily at that. Intel’s work on improving the game performance of the Core Ultra series has clearly borne some fruit, as it comports itself rather respectably here, even if it still loses out to the Zen 5 CPU. Overall, though, CPU scaling is extremely strong and you’re going to want the newest platform possible for this game.
Monster Hunter Wilds Recommended Settings
Here are our recommendations for each of the GPUs that we tested:
Of course, you’re more than welcome to experiment with the extensive settings menu yourself, and frankly, we found Capcom’s own defaults to be quite sensible for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. (It doesn’t quite seem to know what to make of Intel GPUs.) This game really lends value to GPUs with more than 8GB of video RAM, though. The ultra settings are a small-but-noticeable upgrade over the high settings, particularly with regard to texture quality and geometry detail. Here are a few image quality comparisons we’ve prepared to show off the difference:
If you’d like, you can download the full-resolution 4K comparison shots here [7-zip, 16MB]. It’s fair to say that during gameplay you probably won’t notice the difference, and some people may never notice at all, particularly when playing at 1080p resolution. Folks with higher-rez monitors, though, and especially those who put a lot of care into customizing their character’s appearance, will absolutely appreciate the increased texture detail and wider use of tessellation. Some of the assets seem authored to take tessellation into account, and don’t actually look correct without it.
Overall, we’re completely stoked for Monster Hunter Wilds and will be diving in head first when it launches tomorrow. If you’re convinced to try it, perhaps as a test for a brand-new system, you can snag it on Steam for $70. Alternatively, you can get a free copy with the purchase of select AMD Ryzen and Radeon components from now until April 26th. You can head to AMD’s site to see the details of that promotion.
And that’s all we have for you today! Let us know down in the comments if you’d like us to test anything else before the game comes out, or if you have any questions about our data.