Monster Hunter Wilds PC Title Update 4: Now Up to 20% Faster

We've struggled through the year with Monster Hunter Wilds' problematic PC version, a game that remained so unoptimised since its February launch that we resorted to a fan-made mod to remedy its issues with GPUs using 8GB of VRAM. Perhaps rising public attention finally convinced the MH team at Capcom to more formally address the issues - which they've apparently done in the form of Title Update 4, out this week.

While its results are admittedly a bit uneven, our tests confirm that TU4 delivers a net win for the game's PC version - with gains ranging from 8-20 percent in GPU-limited scenarios.

Up until this patch, mid-spec PC players had the option of blurry "medium" textures, somewhat sharper "high" textures with increased frame-time stuttering, or an unofficial modding method that balloons the game's installation size, but allows high quality textures to run without issue on 8GB graphics cards. Now, with TU4, the game's performance improves on an 8GB GPU whether playing with medium or high textures enabled - and the in-game menus no longer offer stern warnings about "serious glitches" for selecting high textures in this kind of configuration.

In the game's opening sequence, there's a roughly eight percent frame-rate uplift on an RTX 3070 PC - paired with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D at the "high" visual preset and DLSS in "balanced" mode upscaling to 1440p, to create a GPU-limited testing scenario. Boost the texture quality from medium to high in the same PC testing scenario, and the uplift remains similar at nine percent - albeit now with a significant quelling of Title Update 3's frame-time spikes, which brings out a far greater sense of smoothness in TU4 than the frame-rate boost.

Move the testing scenario to the settlement zone near the opening sequence, however, and the game as running on high textures jumps even more incredibly in performance. This portion of the game runs so poorly with high textures on 8GB GPUs that it's practically unplayable without installing a fan-made texture-decompression mod. Yet TU4 manages to boost performance in this GPU-pounding region even more than TU3 with the mod, by as much as 20 percent. That's arguably more of an apples-to-apples performance-boost measurement than the boost from an unmodded TU3 installation, as that comparison is nearly a tripling in performance.

The catch being, you're going to see a lot more texture pop-in with TU4 and a lower-VRAM GPU. That's the general cost across the board for TU4 whether textures are set to medium or high. In the opening sequence of an airship flying over a landscape, grasses and hills below the ship now render in blobby, N64-like fashion on TU4 at either texture setting.

It's an embarrassing visual introduction that otherwise blemishes an across-the-board quality boost for most MHW textures at both medium and high texture quality. Depending on where you're looking and how quickly you turn the in-game camera, texture pop-in can rear its head as players wait for textures to fully load and appear on surfaces. Yet otherwise, texture details at either setting are generally improved, making medium better but still mushy and high looking generally quite clear at its best.

We have also confirmed some subtle reductions in character geometry between TU3 and TU4, ones that you may not necessarily notice without zooming in on details. Perhaps this geometry reduction was a necessary sacrifice to balance the PC version's demands on GPU performance. Based on our frame-rate and frame-time counts, whatever they've done so far is absolutely working.

Capcom has suggested two more GPU-optimisation patches are slated to launch in January and February of next year, and we're hopeful the gains seen in this week's patch are paid further forward without any regressions. As soon as Capcom gives access to those, we'll report back with additional findings - and will keep an eye out on any console-specific tweaks that coincide with those patches, as well.