‘My air fryer is more optimized than this’: Monster Hunter Wilds players are suffering from performance issues

It’s so bad that, for some players, the graphics have reverted to 1996. Reddit user Impressive-Cry-3448 posted screenshots of blurry, polygonal characters who look like they came from a Nintendo 64 game. Many of the graphical issues that were present during the beta playtests are still present in the final game, and players aren’t happy about it.

On Steam, where the game reached over a million concurrent players just hours after its release, the user reviews are flooded with low scores due to the performance problems. If it isn’t blocky characters, it’s crashes or single digit frame rates. Out of over 16,000 reviews, there are enough poor scores to give it a “Mixed” rating.

“Very immersive game,” wrote Sgt. Walker Rhymes in one of the most upvoted Steam reviews, “You can cook a well-done steak on your GPU while you play, and the hot blasts of air from your PC fans truly make you feel like you are in the desert.”

“My air fryer is more optimized than this,” wrote Steam user WaterBottle.

There are several posts on the Monster Hunter subreddit discussing similar problems, and people are trying to troubleshoot them in the comments. Some players have seen improvements by turning frame generation off or updating the game’s version of Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling tech to the latest one with a tool called DLSS Swapper — but your mileage may vary. Officially, Capcom says players should update their graphics card drivers and make sure their version of Windows is up to date.

Console performance is reportedly more consistent, but plagued with stuttery frame rates and low-resolution textures. Digital Foundry did a preliminary performance analysis on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S versions and said all of them feel “undercooked” for a modern game. Even the PlayStation 5 Pro version struggles to run well.

It’s a shame that so many players are stuck fighting performance issues instead of monsters in a game that they’ve been waiting years for, and one that had multiple beta tests where these issues were reported. Despite the troubles, the concurrent player count on Steam hasn’t dipped by much, hovering around 700,000 at the time of this writing. Dragon’s Dogma 2, another Capcom game rife with performance issues, has significantly improved on consoles and moderately on PC since its launch last year, so hopefully Monster Hunter Wilds will get the same — if not better — treatment in the coming weeks.