I have a bit of a bad habit of avoiding things that cause me stress. I only check my bank account when I have to pay a bill, and it takes me all day to work up the courage to open the app. One time I let my license plates expire, then left them expired for three years. I have other strengths, I assure you, but dealing with stressors is not one of them.
Related
Monster Hunter Wilds Open Beta Might Be Extended By 24 Hours Due To PlayStation Network Outage
Don’t worry, Hunters, you probably won’t have lost out on valuable Wilds time.
With Monster Hunter Wilds right around the corner, I’ve been faced with a new source of anxiety. My faithful RTX 3070 graphics card, which I paid a not-insignificant $600 for back in 2020, has been showing signs of aging for a while. I’ve been avoiding replacing it like I avoid most things that suck, so for the last year I’ve been steadily lowering my graphics settings in games, making little compromises here and there just to get them to run. I’ve given up so many textures and shadows just to squeeze a little more juice out of this geriatric GPU, but I fear its time has finally come. Monster Hunter Wilds demands no compromise.
It Might Be Time For An Upgrade
Today I confirmed what I’ve long expected by installing the Monster Hunter Wilds Benchmark on Steam, a nifty little tool that will let you play with your graphics settings to see what kind of performance to expect when the game launches later this month. If you’re in a similar situation as me, holding on to a half-decade old card and hoping you can stick with it until tax return time, I urge you to download the benchmark and find out right now if 2025 is the year you upgrade.
The Wild’s benchmark tool isn’t nearly as sophisticated as some other programs (Returnal’s remains undefeated) but it will tell you exactly what you need to know: can this old rig run Monster Hunter Wilds? In my case, the answer is a definitive… not really.
To be fair to my machine, I’m asking a lot from it. My display is a 49”, 32:9 super ultrawide – the most obnoxiously wide monitor you’ve ever seen, and my favorite piece of tech in the whole world. Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t support super ultrawide, unfortunately, so I’ll have to settle for a paltry 21:9 ultrawide aspect ratio. In borderless windowed mode, it still displays at the monitor’s native 5120×1440 resolution. Suffice to say my first benchmark test for Wilds went exactly as expected. My GPU is straight up not having a good time.
There’s Still Time To Tweak
The test is around five minutes long and begins with the game’s opening cutscene. Once it ends you’ll watch a player character give you a short tour of the first biome, the Windward Plains. It introduces some monsters, shows some different weather conditions, and ends with a cutscene in one of the map’s villages.
You’ll get a real-time FPS readout as well as a cumulative average during the test. On high settings with everything set to default, I finished with an average of 45fps, but saw it dip as low as 15fps at certain times, particularly at the end in the village.
I got to tweaking and managed to steal back quite a few frames. Lowering the presets and turning off some of the foliage, shadows, and details gave me a whopping four additional frames on average, but changing the DLSS settings to prioritize performance (i.e., frames) allowed me to hit a 45fps average with a minimum of 30fps. And it was barely hanging on to 30fps.
I could play at 30fps, and I might even be able to squeeze a little more performance out with some more tweaking. But I’ve been waiting seven years for the follow up to Monster Hunter: World, and I don’t want to have the bare minimum experience. Upgrading video cards is the most painful thing about being a PC gamer, but it’s the price we pay for greatness.
I’m glad I found out now when there are still a few weeks until launch, rather than trying to jump into the game and waste a bunch of time testing my settings. Kudos to Capcom for releasing this much-needed tool ahead of time, even if it’s causing me great distress.
- Released
-
February 28, 2025
- ESRB
-
T For Teen // Violence, Blood, Crude Humor