I've just tried the open beta of Monster Hunter Wilds. It's my first proper try at a Monster Hunter game. I might make a review on that later but let's talk about performance.

Beta Performance

During the initial cutscene when you enter the game, I didn't have any recordings, but I did have Steam's FPS overlay open so I could look at it every once in a while, and it went anywhere between 40FPS and 50FPS but never really above that. When I the got into the camp, it dipped to a 35FPS to 45FPS range. Then onward to the first monster it ranged anywhere from 20FPS and 40FPS. It's not great, it's really not.

Specs

I should probably talk about my specs. This is what I run:

ASUS ROG Strix B450-F GAMING
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti TUF OC V2
DDR4 3200MHz 4x8GB
Corsair 750W PSU
Kingston A2000 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD
Windows 11 Pro (x64)
2560x1440p60Hz

Benchmarking Software

Seeing the developers ship a benchmark with the game is something we rarely see. Especially as a free standalone that you can download without buying the game. Looking at the recommended specs for the game and comparing it to the beta, it's very clear something's off. However, looking at the version number of the beta, you can see it's v0.0001.xxx which indicates this is an older version of the game. The benchmark however runs on v1.0000.xxx, which indicates the benchmarking tool is probably based on the most recent up to date patch, just purely with a set sequence rather than the game itself that you can play. That means the results from the benchmark is more accurate than that of a beta. It does beg the question of why we run a beta on a version that is long outdated rather than a version that actually needs testing, but that's beyond the scope of this rant.

Benchmark 1

The first benchmark I ran was on default settings. The game defaulted to High which looking into it afterwards is with DLSS set to Balanced and NVIDIA Reflex set to Off. I left these as is for the test and it returned this result:

Image showing the benchmark of the user, with a score of 14100 and an average score of 41.59FPS

I wish the benchmark would show each section of the benchmark. First cutscene, very normal fps around 45FPS. Then the game intro with the first environment was about 35FPS. The town is where the benchmark tanked going very much around 25FPS to 30FPS. The average around this point was close to 38FPS up till this point. During the food scene, this went back up to an average of 41.59FPS as the FPS was closer to 50FPS at this point.

Benchmark 2

For the second benchmark I tweaked settings to what I'd generally pick for a game I play. As a baseline I turned NVIDIA Reflex to On + Boost as well as putting Graphics to Medium rather than high. This did change DLSS to Performance, which I changed back to Balanced because the other option didn't look so great. I then went and turned off Motion Blur and Depth of Field. The rest was left pretty much as is. I noticed there was no option to cap the FPS. I'm guessing this is due to this being a benchmark, you want the uncapped results. I'm pretty sure the released game will have these options available. This was the result of my second benchmark.

Image showing the benchmark of the user, with a score of 15789 and an average score of 46.08FPS

First cutscene, already an improvement. Averaged around 50FPS to 55FPS. The first environment of gameplay saw 40FPS to 45FPS. The town itself, didn't really dip and instead saw 35FPS to 45FPS. Lastly the food scene again saw around 50FPS, putting this at 46.08FPS. One main difference between this benchmark and the first is that the variation between highest and lowest FPS for this one is much more narrow than the first one, which is a very positive thing to see.

In Summary