Monster Hunter Wilds Performance Woes
Monster Hunter Wilds has earned a bit of a reputation for poor PC performance. Since launch, players have reported heavy frame rate drops, stuttering and generally rough optimization, which has dragged the game’s Steam rating down to Mixed. Even after multiple patches, many PC gamers are still struggling to keep frame rates smooth.
Recently, a curious discovery from a player on Reddit has sparked a fresh wave of interest. It suggests that Monster Hunter Wilds might actually run better if you own more downloadable content. Even stranger, a custom mod that skips the game’s DLC check appears to boost performance significantly on some systems.
If you are playing on PC and wondering why your expensive hardware is not delivering the performance you expect, this odd DLC interaction might be part of the story.
The DLC Check Theory And Player Mod
Reddit user de_Tylmarande noticed something unusual when switching between two different Monster Hunter Wilds accounts. One account had no DLC at all, while the other had purchased all available DLC. The result was surprising.
- On the account with no DLC they reported very heavy and consistent FPS drops down to around 20 to 25 frames per second in hub areas.
- On the account with all DLC bought they claimed the game ran at over 80 FPS in the same locations.
Digging deeper, de_Tylmarande created a small home brewed mod that skips the game’s DLC verification process. Importantly, this mod does not unlock any DLC illegally. Instead, it bypasses the system that checks which DLC is installed.
The theory is that this DLC check is surprisingly expensive in terms of system resources. If the game repeatedly scans your DLC status while you move through certain areas, that could introduce unnecessary CPU overhead and cause frame rate drops. By skipping the check entirely, the mod removes that overhead and can therefore improve performance.
The strangest claim from the redditor is that the more DLC you own, the better the performance gets. In their case, an account with no DLC ran poorly, while one loaded with cosmetic and add on content ran dramatically faster.
Independent Testing On Modern Hardware
To test whether this DLC theory actually holds up, an independent set of benchmarks was run on a completely different PC. Instead of a gaming laptop, the tester used a powerful desktop system with an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X CPU and an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti graphics card. That is a modern, mid to high end gaming rig, much faster than the Intel Core i7 12800HX laptop with RTX 3070 Ti mobile that the redditor used.
Two versions of the game were tested:
- A fresh installation with no DLC
- The same game with all 189 DLC items installed, excluding the high resolution texture pack
The game was run at 4K resolution using the High preset. DLSS was set to Balanced, and frame generation was disabled. Multiple runs were made around the first camp area, making sure to pass the in game DLC vendor Conut at the same point on each run, to keep things consistent.
The average results looked like this:
- No DLC: 61 frames per second average, 36 FPS 1 percent lows
- All DLC installed: 67 frames per second average, 35 FPS 1 percent lows
On this modern desktop, having every DLC installed only boosted the average frame rate by around six FPS. The 1 percent lows stayed virtually unchanged and no major change in stuttering was observed. Running missions outside that camp area did not show a meaningful difference either and the small FPS bump stayed well within a narrow range.
So while there was a measurable gain in performance when all DLC was installed, it was nowhere near the dramatic leap reported by the original redditor. This suggests that hardware specs and system bottlenecks play a big role in how much this DLC behavior affects your PC.
What Might Be Going On And What You Should Do
There is a working theory that explains these odd results. Conut, the furry NPC who handles DLC related content, might be triggering the DLC check any time you enter a camp where they are present or move within a certain range. If that check is coded in a way that puts heavy load on the CPU or forces the game to sift through DLC entries inefficiently, it could cause noticeable FPS drops.
If you have no DLC, the game might be constantly verifying that there is nothing to load. If you have everything, it may in some cases complete the process in a more straightforward way, or skip certain steps, which would align with the minor FPS improvement seen on the desktop test. The custom mod that removes this DLC check entirely would then bypass the whole process and free up resources, especially on weaker CPUs or laptops.
However, this is still only a theory. The second set of tests did not show massive drops when standing near Conut, only a roughly 10 FPS dip when entering the hub camp from the open world. That kind of drop is expected anyway, since hubs are full of NPCs and visual effects, and any DLC related performance penalty could be hiding inside that normal load.
Right now, there is no strong reason to go out and buy a mountain of DLC purely for performance. On powerful rigs the improvement appears to be modest and on lower spec systems results may vary widely. It feels more like a subtle bug or design oversight than a reliable tuning trick.
The good news is that the original mod author has already contacted Capcom with their data. If the developer can track down the underlying issue, a future patch might remove this odd DLC interaction entirely and give everyone a free performance bump. If that does not happen, the redditor has suggested they may finish the mod and release it as an open source tool for PC players who are still struggling.
In the meantime, your best path to higher frame rates in Monster Hunter Wilds is still classic PC tuning. Lowering demanding graphics settings, dialing back resolution, tuning DLSS or other upscaling options, and following a detailed PC settings guide will offer bigger and more consistent gains than counting on DLC quirks.
Monster Hunter Wilds is still a demanding game and there is no single magic setting that will fix every performance problem. But as this DLC bug story shows, there is likely more optimization work for the developers to do and PC players can expect further performance changes as patches continue to roll out.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/redditor-claims-that-monster-hunter-wilds-runs-better-the-more-dlc-you-own-and-it-does-but-not-by-much-on-my-machine/
