Monster Hunter Wilds Slays Black Ops 6 On Steam And Here's How It Benchmarks

Monster Hunter is a series with a long and storied history, but if you're not a hardcore fan of Japanese action games, you might not know that. The upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, which will usher in the sixth generation of the series with its launch in February, is in fact the twenty-sixth Monster Hunter game release since the original title way back in 2004 on the PlayStation 2.

If you still need convincing that Monster Hunter is a big deal, how about this? The Monster Hunter Wilds free beta test, which is something like an early demo, has not even been out for a full day, yet it has hit a peak player count of 463,798 players. That puts it ahead of the brand-new Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which has peaked at 306,460 players so far. It also puts the MH Wilds beta just behind the all-time peak of mega-hit Helldivers 2, which topped out at 458,709 concurrent players earlier this year.

A lot of the talk surrounding Monster Hunter Wilds, at least among PC players (who make up a majority of Capcom's audience now), has been the rather high PC system requirements, particularly with regard to CPUs. There's been some concern among PC gamers that their older Zen 2 or 10th-gen machines may not hack it for the new game. Out of curiosity, your author decided to put the demo through its paces on all of the platforms that he had on hand.

The benchmark data is primarily focused around performance tests in the most CPU-taxing area that we found in the beta, which is the encampment that you end up in after the story portion of the beta concludes. This area has a ton of geometry and numerous NPCs milling about, which makes it quite heavy on the processor. To avoid a GPU bottleneck, we tested with a GeForce RTX 4080 in native 1080p, but used the "Ultra" settings preset to generate the maximum amount of CPU load.

As you can see, things are pretty dire for some of our older CPUs. The Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 7 5800X both struggle a bit in this game on Ultra settings, even with tightly-tuned low-latency RAM. In particular, the old Zen 2 part really feels creaky in this title; that 33.9 FPS one-percent score is telling a story.

On the other hand, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D shines, maintaining the best framerate consistency in the bunch and a 1% low of over 60 FPS. It actually outperforms the Core Ultra 9 285K in our testing, which surprised us so much that we completely reformatted that machine and did a clean install of Windows and all of Intel's drivers, along with a CMOS reset, to make sure our results were accurate—which is why this post is so late in the day.

But what about Frame Generation? While the extensive settings menu in Monster Hunter Wilds has numerous options to fiddle with, there's no mention of any ray-tracing anywhere. However, Frame Generation is present and in fact, the game prompts you to enable it on first startup if you have a compatible system. We also tested with DLSS frame generation to see how it affects frame rates, and here's our results:

On every single machine, enabling DLSS Frame Generation gave us a tremendous boost to performance, but it helped more with some systems than others. Our Ryzen 7 5800X3D actually doesn't see that much of a boost from enabling Frame Generation, while the Core Ultra 9 285K sees a tremendous benefit, as does the Ryzen 7 8700G. There's some variance in our testing; we'd consider the top two Ryzen results to be fundamentally identical, meaning that the combination of those fast Ryzen CPUs and Frame Generation has relieved the performance bottleneck.

With that said, it's important to keep in mind that when playing with Frame Generation, the game "feels" like it's running at the actual render framerate, not the presented framerate (including generated frames.) Keeping that in mind, Frame Generation may not be a great solution for folks cranking along on older CPUs. However, if you're rocking a Zen 3 processor or newer, we say turn it on and enjoy the high frame-rate goodness.

Monster Hunter Wilds is based on the same engine technology as Street Fighter 6, Dragon's Dogma II, and the recent Resident Evil games. Capcom's in-house "RE Engine" is known to be pretty heavy, and while it doesn't have the same rendering featureset as the advanced Dragon's Dogma 2, this game's open world environments are still very demanding. 

If you're keen to hop in Monster Hunter Wilds in February, you may want to start looking at CPU and GPU upgrades if you're not already on current- or last-generation parts, but you can find out for sure how it runs by jumping into the beta, which runs through the weekend, ending on November 3rd.