Further testing seems to confirm Monster Hunter Wilds DLC performance improvement theory, to an extent

I think we all want it to be true that the Monster Hunter Wilds’ infamously limp PC performance can be blamed upon, as was reported yesterday, an overzealous DLC checking process gumming up what might overwise be a perfectly fine-running beastfight game. Partly because it just sounds funny. Willing but frustrated graphics elves running about, harangued to distraction by a hairstyle add-on overseer nagging for licenses, like a Daily Telegraph reader demanding to know why you aren’t wearing a poppy on November 3rd.

The best part? All evidence suggests it genuinely is true – albeit only to varying degrees, and in the case of my own testing, nowhere near as drastically as in the originally discovered case.

To recap, redditor de_Tylmarande found that framerates around MHW’s base camp hubs more than tripled after tricking MHW into thinking he had all the game’s cosmetic DLCs – 190 in total, and costing over £460 in the King’s sterling – installed. Separately, a mod limiting the checks was also widely found to improve performance in those hubs, especially around the desks where a DLC-hocking cat hangs out. Capcom themselves then announced, with suspicious timing, an upcoming patch containing performance improvements.

I wanted to see what happens when you legitimately do have the full cosmetic catalogue in your account, so fired up the RPS Test Rig and took some framerate recordings on a ‘clean’ install, free of add-ons. I then went about dropping nearly half a grand on fluffy pendants and bird outfits, by which I mean I added them all through our Steam press account at the expense of nobody in particular.

Subsequent retests indicated, at best, FPS improvements that remain dependent on the hardware producing them. With the popular RTX 4060, running at 1080p/Ultra with some help from Quality DLSS, a pre-DLC average of 66fps around camp only rose to 67fps after the shopping spree. However, the much more powerful RTX 5080, at 4K/Ultra (also with DLSS Quality), got a more substantial rise of 67fps to 73fps. Still miles off a tripling, but enough to escape any likely margin of error.

Both GPUs also saw slight improvements to 0.1% framerates, which basically means their lowest framerates didn’t fall as low. Before DLC, the RTX 4060’s 0.1% value was 42fps, which climbed to 45fps afterwards. The RTX 5080’s low of 27fps also ticked up to 33fps. Since one of Monster Hunter Wilds’ biggest performance annoyances is its stuttering, even small gains like this can translate into visibly smoother running.

Since the bug appears location-based, worsening in severity the closer you get to that DLC vendor, I didn’t see any meaningful boosts to average framerates out in the field. As such, and in case this wasn’t apparent already, Rock Paper Shotgun Dot Com does not recommend the purchasing of nearly 200 trinkets in an attempt to make MHW go faster. Still, the base camp results do back up the theory that something is amiss; I’ll have another go after Capcom’s patch arrives on January 27th, and see if this most unusual of transactional bugs gets squished.