Despite a rather successful launch last year, Monster Hunter Wilds hasn't been as big a success as Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise. The low challenge level and massive performance issues across all formats prevented the game from capitalizing on its launch momentum, with sales dwindling so much that it became CAPCOM's worst-selling game in the past few months, soundly outsold by games that had been on the market much longer.
While the low-challenge issues were fixed last year with Title Updated, introducing new challenging monsters and more powerful variants of already available ones, the performance issues weren't. December's update was a small step in the right direction, but all eyes were on the January PC performance update, which promised to deliver the performance improvements the game desperately needed.
And, against all odds, the new Monster Hunter Wilds patch delivered its promises, significantly improving performance on various PC configurations and even on the Steam Deck.
The 1.040.03.01 PC performance patch went live earlier today, alongside the official patch notes outlining some of the changes, which include:
- Improved CPU/GPU processing specific to the Steam version.
- Reduced shader warming processes performed outside the shader compilation screen to lower CPU load.
- Adjusted texture streaming to improve visual quality while reducing VRAM usage.
- Adjusted the High Resolution Texture Pack to reduce VRAM usage and overall package size.
- Added a CPU tab to the Options menu, allowing players to adjust settings related to CPU load.
- Added new categories to the graphics settings, along with new settings for existing options.
- Adjusted graphic presets and added a confirmation window to automatically update your settings on first launch after updating.
- Expanded the Volumetric Fog setting in the graphics options from two levels to five. The previous "High" setting has been renamed to "Highest," and "Low" to "High," with three new lower options—"Medium," "Low," and "Lowest"—now available.
- Fixed an issue where a warning dialogue incorrectly indicated that the AMD Radeon driver was outdated when using driver version 26.1.1 or later.
On paper, these changes sound promising, but do they actually improve performance? It seems they do, looking at online reports. "Game doesn't stutter with highest textures anymore, very good," reported moqz on the ResetERA forums. While the user reports that on an RTX 4070 Ti at 4K resolution and NVIDIA DLSS in Performance Mode, the framerate still drops below 60 FPS in certain areas, it seems to be generally more stable.
"Significant uplift. I have a 4070 Ti Super and I'm currently running with everything cranked (including the high res texture pack), DLAA and 2X framegen. 100-120 fps. Image quality also feels sharper," said another ResetERA user, jrx8080, who's running the game on an RTX 4070 Ti GPU at max settings, DLAA, and 2X Frame Generation, hitting 100-120 FPS, though the user didn't specify at which resolution.
The first comparison videos shared on YouTube by Video Game Performance, Pandapa, and WreckitRai offer a clearer view of what the patch does. While the average framerate isn't significantly higher than the previous version of the game, frametimes are far more stable, which contributes to the game feeling generally smoother than before.
The new Monster Hunter Wilds patch also brought significant performance improvements on Steam Deck. A new video by Deck Wizard shows the game running on Valve's system with the patch, hitting a relatively stable 30 FPS at low settings, finally making the game somewhat playable on it.
As more performance improvements are expected to come next month, on February 18th, things are definitely looking up for those who wish to play the game on the go and don't want to wait for the inevitable Nintendo Switch 2 port, which is all but confirmed to be in the works.
Besides introducing these performance fixes, the new Monster Hunter Wilds PC performance patch also addresses the DLC checks issue that came to light earlier this month and impacted performance in the Base Camp and Grand Hub.
These performance improvements are set to be further cemented in the Monster Hunter Wilds February 18 update, which will introduce additional CPU and GPU optimizations.
With a lot more online reports mentioning performance improvements with this new Monster Hunter Wilds patch, it feels like the game may finally be in the perfect spot to bring players back ahead of the yet-to-be-revealed Master Rank expansion. Hopefully, it will build on the solid game mechanics of the base game to deliver the definitive Monster Hunter experience it has always had the potential to be, in my opinion.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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