Monster Hunter Wilds performance overview
Beta of Monster Hunter Wilds based on an older build hit some players with performance issues. Now we also have a dedicated benchmark tool based on more recent, close to release
version of the game. Either way, the game isn't easy to run without good hardware.
CPU benchmarks
All benchmarks have been done on the latest Windows 11, latest drivers. Test systems had 16GB of RAM (3200CL22, dual channel). CPU benchmarks were done with a Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card. The game was tested on high settings without frame generation and without upscaling.
1440p without any frame generation or upscaling seems to be GPU bound (RX 6950XT) on 12400F, 5900X, and 5800X3D.
5800X3D with extra cache reigns supreme in gaming, and it's the same for Monster Hunter, although 5900X is close. Newer Ryzens - 7800X3D and more so 9800X3D should offer even better performance, assuming you will have the GPU to match.
Intel i5-12400F 6/12 core part is still good as an ultimate budget part, while also having newer generations available. The i7-12700H is a laptop mobile CPU that was tested on an Erying custom motherboard. 6 performance and 8 efficiency cores should perform better than 6 performance cores in 12400F but it's not the case here. Either some core scheduling issues or some other bottleneck.
Old Ryzen 3500X and Intel i5-9400F 6/6 core parts on average were very even in gaming performance, but here Intel pulls noticeably ahead. The Ryzen 4650G APU 6/12 core CPU usually performs slightly worse in gaming than 3500X due to a smaller cache, but for Wilds, it's better. This could indicate that the game is sensitive to inter-core latency, and concurrency within the CPU.
On weaker CPUs like i5-9400F or Ryzen 3500X some parts of the benchmark had problems loading/rendering all assets in time and large parts of the environment were low resolution
in looks. With better CPUs, this effect was smaller or non-existent.
Intel PresentMon is a performance monitoring tool and overlay that can show a few interesting metrics. One of them - GPU Busy shows how long a given frame was handled by the GPU. If the frame time and GPU busy time are similar then the frame was very likely limited by the GPU performance. When the frame time is much higher than the GPU busy then it's likely CPU struggling or the game having problems with scheduling work effectively.
GPU benchmarks
Without any upscaling or frame generation you will need a relatively modern and powerful GPU to hit 60 FPS on high settings. Cutting down on shadow quality or a few other manual toggles can give more frames without noticeable degradation to visuals.
Previous generation flagship, RX 6950 XT launched in 2022 and based on the same die as RX 6900 XT from 2021 manages to handle the game easily at 1080p while still breaking 60 FPS at 1440p. The flagship should be between 4K and 1440p, not 1080p and 1440p but this is already an old flagship two generations behind. Another question is how efficient can you make such a game - how much performance is still there to be regained?
With upscaling (FSR) and frame generation the FPS can increase noticeably but those technologies have drawbacks as well. The ghosting or blurry motion is the main one. You need a good base framerate and quality for it to work on an acceptable level. The benchmark uses FSR 3.1 which isn't as good as Nvidia solutions or demoed FSR 4 and it AI Frame Gen.
Cheap mainstream RX 7600 and older RX 5600 cards can get acceptable performance and gain some FPS with FSR upscaling (and then even more with frame gen).
Intel Arc A750 had big problems with running the game well. If you are looking at B580 Battle Mage then check if anyone already tested it, as it also should solve some of the Arc problems with running games without weird performance regressions.
RTX 3050 as an old low-end card should be able to play the game at 1080p medium/low settings, especially with some frame generation aid. Note that this game needs a relatively strong CPU as well so a weak CPU + weak GPU may not perform as well.
Resolution scaling, ultrawide
I tested the usual set of resolutions as well as 3440x1440 ultrawide. The benchmark ran fine although for some reason there were some black bars on the sides (not very wide but noticeable), even when the benchmark reported 3440x1440 resolution - unsure if it's something with the benchmark or my setup (the display works fine outside the benchmark).
Integrated graphics performance
- Intel i7-12700H Xe graphics: marked as unsupported, benchmark won't run. Lunar Lake Xe2 iGPU is Arc/Battle Mage based so could run.
- Snapdragon X Elite: benchmark does not launch on Windows on ARM system
- Ryzen 7840U: the benchmark runs without problems
For this test I used GPD Win Max 2 with Ryzen 7840U, Radeon 780M integrated graphics and 32GB of RAM. This SoC or the Z1 Extreme is used in many gaming handhelds as well. Newer AMD Strix Point and Intel Lunar Lake iGPUs already offer better performance.
To play the game you will have to lower resolution and/or enable frame generation. As this is low settings and low resolution the FSR + Frame Gen output won't be the best for anything in motion.
Summary
The game is pretty demanding when it comes to CPU and then GPU. There is still performance to gain with post-launch fixes and optimizations, but it won't change the bigger picture of what you need to run this game without problems. It's kind of obvious part of the FPS is expected to come from frame generation. Without bleeding-edge flagship GPU you won't get good 4K so either stick to 1440p or ultrawide which can be more immersive than just going to 4K.
The benchmark is very picky on which hardware to run. Intel Xe graphics are unsupported but older AMD GPUs like Vega or RX 580 crash the benchmark during shader compilation.
Linux is not officially supported on the Steam page, but if you bypass that in Steam settings you can install it and try to run it. Some users managed it to work, while in my case the benchmark crashed on an older Ubuntu version.
There is also community driven spreadsheet listing benchmark results for various hardware, much more I can cover here :)
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