Monster Hunter is a series with a long and storied history, but if you’re not a hardcore fan of Japanese action games, you might not know that. The upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, which will usher in the sixth generation of the series with its launch in February, is in fact the twenty-sixthMonster Hunter game release since the original title way back in 2004 on the PlayStation 2.
Monster Hunter Wilds surpassed the all time peak of Helldivers 2 in one day, and this is just the beta.
If you still need convincing that Monster Hunter is a big deal, how about this? The Monster Hunter Wilds free beta test, which is something like an early demo, has not even been out for a full day, yet it has hit a peak player count of 463,798 players. That puts it ahead of the brand-new Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which has peaked at 306,460 players so far. It also puts the MH Wilds beta just ahead of the all-time peak of mega-hit Helldivers 2, which topped out at 458,709 concurrent players earlier this year.
A lot of the talk surrounding Monster Hunter Wilds, at least among PC players (who make up a majority of Capcom’s audience now), has been the rather high PC system requirements, particularly with regard to CPUs. There’s been some concern among PC gamers that their older Zen 2 or 10th-gen machines may not hack it for the new game. Out of curiosity, we decided to put the demo through its paces on a handful of the platforms that we had on hand and ready roll.
The game throws you right into an action setpiece.
The benchmark data is primarily focused around performance tests in the most CPU-taxing area that we found in the beta, which is the encampment that you end up in after the story portion of the beta concludes. This area has a ton of geometry and numerous NPCs milling about, which makes it quite heavy on the processor. To avoid a GPU bottleneck, we tested with a GeForce RTX 4080 in native 1080p, but used the “Ultra” settings preset to generate the maximum amount of CPU load.
As you can see, things are pretty dire for some of the older CPUs. The Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 7 5800X both struggle a bit in this game on Ultra settings, even with tightly-tuned low-latency RAM. In particular, the Zen 2 part feels creaky in this title; that 33.9 FPS one-percent score is telling a sad story.
On the other hand, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D shines, maintaining the best framerate consistency in the bunch and a 1% low of over 60 FPS. It actually outperforms the Core Ultra 9 285K in our testing, which surprised us so much that we completely reformatted that machine and did a clean install of Windows and all of Intel’s drivers, along with a CMOS reset, to make sure our results were accurate (and that’s also why this post went up so late in the day).
The options menu is extremely good.
But what about Frame Generation? While the extensive settings menu in Monster Hunter Wilds has numerous options to fiddle with, there’s no mention of any ray-tracing anywhere. However, Frame Generation is present and in fact, the game prompts you to enable it on first startup if you have a compatible system. We also tested with DLSS frame generation to see how it affects frame rates, and here’s our results:
On every single machine, enabling DLSS Frame Generation gave us a tremendous boost to performance, but it helped more with some systems than others. Our Ryzen 7 5800X3D actually doesn’t see that much of a boost from enabling Frame Generation, while the Core Ultra 9 285K sees a tremendous benefit, as does the Ryzen 7 8700G. Note, there’s some variance in our testing; we’d consider the top two Ryzen results to be fundamentally identical, meaning that the combination of those fast Ryzen CPUs and Frame Generation has relieved the performance bottleneck.
Character rendering is typically stylized, but highly detailed.
With that said, it’s important to keep in mind that when playing with Frame Generation, the game “feels” like it’s running at the actual render framerate, not the presented framerate (including generated frames). Keeping that in mind, Frame Generation may not be a great solution for folks cranking along on older CPUs due to the latency disparity. However, if you’re rocking a Zen 3 processor or newer, we say turn it on and enjoy the high frame-rate goodness.
There’s not much in gaming like the joy of a successful hunt completed.
Monster Hunter Wilds is based on the same engine technology as Street Fighter 6, Dragon’s Dogma 2, and the recent Resident Evil games. Capcom’s in-house “RE Engine” is already well-known to be pretty heavy, and while Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t have the same advanced rendering featureset as Dragon’s Dogma 2, this game’s open world environments are still very demanding.
If you’re keen to hop in Monster Hunter Wilds in February, you may want to start looking at CPU and GPU upgrades if you’re not already on current- or last-generation parts, but you can find out for sure how it runs by jumping into the beta, which runs through the weekend, ending on November 3rd.
