Monster Hunter Wilds title update two aims to defeat the biggest beasts of all: shader compilation and VRAM issues
Capcom have a tough fight on their hands at the moment. No, Arkveld hasn’t escaped from its lair to terrorise the non-OP masses. Monster Hunter Wilds has been suffering from some pretty nasty performance issues on PC.
While they don’t look to have the action game running as well as some kind of crash and stuffer-free Usain Bolt quite yet, the release of Wilds’ second title update has seen the studio try to curb some shader compilation and VRAM-related problems.
Alongside deploying the update, which brings Lagiacrus and a bunch of other new stuff to the game (including Fender guitars, because why not), Capcom have put out a fix aimed at stopping shader compilation while you’re playing from causing “high CPU load and unstable performance”.
Now, instead of shaders being complied once you’re hunning the mons, that process’ll take place at launch when there’s a fresh update to apply, and you won’t need to worry about trying to delete your shader cache files in order to improve the situation.
That’s not the only thing the devs have done, with title update two’s full patch notes revealing some other Steam-specific tweaks designed to help reverse the game’s recent review fortunes in the Valve money place.
First of all, you’ll now have a warning pop up if you try to launch the Wilds with out of date GPU drivers, an unsupported OS, or while using compatibility mode. There’s also some extra support for Nvidia and AMD upscaling and frame generation tech.
The big fixes in the notes, though, concern VRAM. Capcom have tweaked how much of it’s used when the game’s streaming textures, fixed the VRAM usage estimate in the game’s settings not being accurate, and rectified that last one also affecting distant shadow quality readouts.
As for how much these fixes have improved things performance-wise for PC Wilds, the verdict so far looks to be a bit mixed, with some folks reporting that things are generally better and others still seemingly running into crash and frame rate problems.
