Is there a PC gaming experience more universal than poking at graphics settings one at a time, dropping anisotropic filtering and rendering distance from high, to medium, to low, in the forlorn hope of seeing the framerate counter inch over the 60 fps line? I found myself in that familiar spot this afternoon when Capcom released the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark on Steam. It promises to offer a sense of how well the game will run on our PCs at launch, and made me face the harsh reality that my RTX 3070 isn't going to let me keep nearly as many of those settings on "high" as I'd like. Painful choices lie ahead.
I'll admit I'm hoping for a lot from a four-year-old graphics card that has only 8GB of VRAM (which was stingy then, and feels particularly stingy now!); I use a 1440p monitor, and that resolution isn't compatible with running many cutting edge games at 60 fps without some settings dropped right down to the floor.
Except, well, that's still an average of a very long benchmark, and even DLSS 4 Performance (which did look impressively clean to my eye) couldn't stop Wilds from dipping down to around 50 fps when the dramatic weather effects kicked off. It feels like I found a compromise I can live with, even if I'm sad to see 60 fps slip out of reach for my RTX 3070 unless I make some more dramatic sacrifices.
Ray tracing isn't even on the table, and I'm worried that in a real fight in the middle of a storm I'm going to see even lower frames than this controlled benchmark lets on. I think Capcom may be instigating more questions than it is offering reassuring answers by putting this in the hands of PC players a few weeks ahead of launch. But it does at least seem to indicate we're not looking at disastrous performance on day one.
Our hardware team will have much, much more to say about Monster Hunter Wilds' PC performance when we get our hands on the full game.
