Following up on the Sony State of Play, Capcom released the PC requirements for the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, and the response hasn’t been great. For the most part, the requirements aren’t insane. You’ll need a midrange CPU from the last few generations, 16GB of RAM, and 140GB of space of SSD — yes, a 140GB game isn’t that insane in 2024. The issue concerns what kind of graphics card you’ll need.
In the recommended specs, Capcom lists the RTX 2070 Super, RTX 4060, or RX 6700 XT as possible options. However, this is to get you 60 frames per second (fps) at 1080p with the Medium graphics preset. Worse, and the center of most of the controversy, is that these requirements assume you have frame generation enabled.
The internet unsurprisingly isn’t happy. On the r/Nvidia subreddit, user u/jungianRaven wrote: “Using framegen to reach 60fps is insane. I’m surprised they actually list it as a performance target.” On the r/MonsterHunter subreddit, user u/pinkeyes34 shared a similar sentiment: “Frame gen just to reach 60fps. That’s pretty much my worst fear of the game realized.”
You can see these comments echoed in just about every forum post where the Monster Hunter Wilds system requirements have shown up, and it’s no surprise. Frame-generation technology, such as what’s available with DLSS 3 and FSR 3, increases latency. The game may look like it’s running at 60 fps, but since half of those frames are generated, you get the responsiveness of a game that’s running at 30 fps.
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This isn’t a big issue at higher frame rates, which is why frame-generation tools like Lossless Scaling recommend a base frame rate of at least 60 fps before turning on frame generation. At lower base frame rates, such as 30 fps, there’s a strange disconnect between the smoothness you see on screen and the responsive you feel with your controller.
Frame generation also doesn’t work well at lower base frame rates. The tech works by rendering two frames, comparing them, and then guessing what a frame in between would look like — a technique known as frame interpolation. With a low base frame rate, there’s a large difference between two rendered frames, meaning the frame generation algorithm has to do a lot more guessing. That leads to nasty visual artifacts that otherwise wouldn’t show up.
All of this is ignoring that Monster Hunter Wilds recommends frame generation to reach 60 fps on the Medium preset of the game at 1080p, which is a fairly low performance target for graphics cards as powerful as the RTX 4060 and RX 6700 XT. It’s possible Capcom is playing it safe with its system requirements after the disastrous PC release of Dragon’s Dogma 2, but we won’t know for sure until Monster Hunter Wilds releases on February 28, 2025.
