Still troubled by Monster Hunter Wilds’ stubbornly sedate PC performance, even after multiple patches claiming to grease its framerate gears? The good news is that Capcom have committed to pushing through performance and stability updates into, at the very least, Winter 2025. The bad news is that Capcom also say they won’t have finished their performance and stability improvements until, at the earliest, Winter 2025.
In a post detailing tomorrow’s version 1.021 update, game director Yuya Tokuda ran through Capcom’s future plans for the PC version, specifically how they intend to bring down Wilds’ CPU load. The post frames this as an attempt to protect players’ chips by reducing the stress it’s under while playing, but in theory such a change could improve overall performance by allowing CPUs extra go-fast headroom. However, Tokuda specifies that this change will be part of Title Update 4, which is currently down for release sometime between November and January – the 1.021 update itself doesn’t include any notable performance tweaks whatsoever.
What’s more, this will only be phase one of the CPU optimisation plan: “Once the initial implementation is complete,” the post reads, “we will proceed with a second stage of further mitigation measures.”
That’s not all you’re getting – Tokuda adds that unspecified future patches will “address GPU load reduction in a similar manner” – but if you were hoping to finally fell and skin MHW’s performance gremlins anytime soon, there is in fact little to do except watch Capcom keep scraping away at the whetstone and pray that these updates will be more successful than the last few. On that note, although some small gains have been made, Wilds still doesn’t run particularly smoothly even on higher-end graphics cards, and some of Capcom’s attempts to soothe the pain (such as enabling frame generation by default, in a tragic misunderstanding of how frame generation is supposed to work) have smacked of cheap tricks rather than clever solutions.
Will these future patches prove any more successful? I couldn’t say, though other parts of Tokuda’s post aren’t massively enthusing. “In general, increasing the native frame rate will also increase CPU usage,” he writes. “If the frame rate limit is set to unlimited or a high value in the options, CPU performance will be maximized in the attempt to increase the frame rate, which may result in a very high CPU usage. Please adjust your graphics options to limit the frame rate in accordance with your hardware’s specifications.”
Ah, see, maybe low framerates aren’t the problem. It’s you, the feckless player, who is leaving the framerate limit too high, thus causing… bad CPU utilisation, somehow. Don’t worry, though. You only need to keep blaming yourself until we switch to Big Coat weather. Maybe.
