(Image credit: Capcom)

After a number of public betas and a recent benchmark tool, Capcom’s latest entry in the Monster Hunter franchise is here at long last. Monster Hunter Wilds sticks to the tried and tested formula that’s been the hallmark of the series’ 20-year run: accept questions to hunt and vanquish monsters, collect the dropped loot, use it to get better gear, rinse and repeat.

Something that is new is the software development kit used to create the game. Where Monster Hunter: World runs on the evergreen MT Framework, Capcom employed its proprietary RE Engine for Monster Hunter Wilds, last used to power Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster and Dragon’s Dogma 2. The latter was almost certainly used as a template for coding Wilds, because not only are they both open world designs, but they’re also very similar in terms of looks.

Unfortunately, they’re also similar in how well they run, though Monster Hunter Wilds is far less of a CPU hog than Dragon’s Dogma 2 is. The minimum system requirements are very light—e.g. Ryzen 5 3600 with a GeForce GTX 1660—but for some reason, Capcom qualifies the requirements, in all cases, with the caveat of frame generation being used.

I can say right now that frame generation isn’t a must, as one can get a reasonable enough level of performance without using it. However, upscaling certainly is, and I’ll explain why in a moment. There is an enormous array of graphics settings one can tweak but Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t run super fast, even on high-end PC hardware, and many of the settings barely make any difference to the frame rate.

Although I’ve gone through and tested every single one of them, nobody could be expected to wade through them all just to have an enjoyable gaming experience.

So to find out what settings are worth changing, I’ve used four different PCs and run countless loops in the starting zone. While these PCs can’t cover every possible combination of CPU, RAM, and graphics card, they should give you a good enough idea as to what you can do on your gaming PC to have the best balance of graphics and frame rate.

You can, of course, get a rough idea by using Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wild benchmark tool, just like we did. However, the tool focuses more on the cutscenes than the game world itself, so it loads up the GPU rather than the CPU—once you’re out and about hunting and slaying monsters, you’ll soon notice that your central processor is being worked pretty hard.

Entry-level PC: Core i7 9700K (65 W), Radeon RX 5700 XT, 16 GB DDR4-3200
Budget PC: Ryzen 7 5700X3D (105 W), GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, 32 GB DDR4-3200
Mid-range PC: Core i5 13600K (125 W), Radeon RX 7800 XT, 32 GB DDR5-6400
High-end PC: Core Ultra 7 265K (250 W), GeForce RTX 4080 Super, 48 GB DDR5-8000

These four gaming PC configurations were set up to roughly represent rigs levels that match Capcom’s suggest specifications. The entry-level PC has a slight older CPU than the minimum required but the GPU is a little better.

The budget PC is towards the top end of that categorisation, due to the use of the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, but the RTX 3060 Ti stops it from being too over-powered. The graphics cards in the mid-range and high-end PCs are the obvious reason as to why these machines are in those categories.

To get an idea of the best possible performance one can get in Monster Hunter Wilds, I set every graphics option to its lowest value. In some cases, this meant disabling a feature, such as anti-aliasing, depth of field, or water effects, but for the most part, it just reduces the level of quality of a particular rendering effect.

The first thing to note in the above results is just how much of an impact resolution has on the average frame rate, even on minimum graphics settings. The RTX 4080 Super rig only drops 10% in average performance going from 1080p to 1440p, but jumping all the way to 4K knocks 50% off the frame rate.

However, the 1% low frame rate is barely affected by the change in resolution, though one would expect this with an RTX 4080 Super. The Radeon RX 5700 XT system’s 1% lows decreased by 40% going from 1080p to 4K, but that’s par course for a graphics card that’s five years old and was never marketed as being for 4K gaming, even at launch.

Switching all of the graphics options to their highest values, but without upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing enabled, sees a surprising variation in the reduction in performance. The RTX 3060 Ti rig at 1080p, for example, only drops in average performance by 27%, whereas the 1% lows reduce by 38%.

It’s a similar pattern with the other test rigs—the RTX 4080 Super PC drops 25% in average frame rate at 4K, with the 1% lows falling by 31%.

If one compares the two videos above, the improvements in the graphics aren’t substantial enough to warrant the performance drops. The draw distance and quality of shadows are both much better, but objects, textures, and lighting don’t seem a whole lot better. That’s partly because the open-world areas are relatively sparse in nearby detail—it’s only in cutscenes and village/base locations that one can easily tell the difference.

Naturally, the best settings to use on any particular system are going to be somewhere between all-minimum and all-maximum, so let’s take a look at what Monster Hunter Wilds offers in terms of graphics tweaking.

(Image credit: Capcom)

(Image credit: Capcom)

(Image credit: Capcom)

(Image credit: Capcom)

Ignoring things like resolution, aspect ratio, and Vsync, there are 27 individual graphics options to play around with. I would argue that this is far too many to be dealing with but at least a good number of them don’t have a big impact on performance, even on the RX 5700 XT test rig, and they’re best thought of as personal taste options.

For example, motion blur, vignette effect, and depth of field can all be used with a minimal loss in frame rate, but I preferred having them disabled. The first and last are reasonably well implemented, and the vignette effect is fairly subtle, but they arguably don’t make things look all that better.

It’s a similar situation with mesh quality, fur quality, wind simulation quality, surface quality, and distant shadow quality. These all look fine on their lowest settings (though many are just low or high) and it’s only in cutscenes that the differences between the settings really stand out.

The settings that have the biggest impact on performance are texture quality; sky, tree, and sand quality; shadow quality; render distance; shadow distance; ambient light quality; and ambient occlusion. However, the performance changes you’ll get from switching these about will depend very much on what hardware you have.