Monster Hunter Wilds just revealed its release date and opened pre-orders, and with that has also finally revealed the system requirements for its PC version. In short, this is looking like Monster Hunter World all over again - a power-hungry game that's liable to absolutely bring your system to its knees.
At minimum spec, Capcom suggests you have an Intel i5-10600/ i3-12100F or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 paired with a GTX 1660 Super or RX 5600 XT on the official site. Those are pretty old parts at this point, but Capcom says this is only getting you to 30 FPS at "lowest" settings running at 720p upscaled to 1080p. That's more of a compromise than many PC gamers are willing to deal with, but at least there's some accounting for potato machines here.
The weirder part is the recommended specs. Here Capcom recommends an Intel i5-11600K/i5-12400 or Ryzen 5 3600X/5500 paired with an RTX 2070 Super/4060 or Radeon RX 6700XT. That's more along the lines of what you'd expect a current gaming PC to have, but Capcom says this is only getting you to 1080p at "medium" settings. And to hit 60 FPS, you're going to need to enable frame generation.
- Monster Hunter Wilds looks slightly less terrifying for PC gamers: Capcom has reduced system requirements and released a 26GB benchmark tool ahead of the second beta
- Monster Hunter Wilds devs are "looking at" lowering the recommended GPU specs, but a free hardware benchmark tool isn't coming just yet
Frame generation can produce impressive results, but the notion that you'd need AI tech simply to reach 60 FPS at 1080p - arguably the bare minimum for many PC players - is a little tough to swallow. Judging by the response in spots like Reddit, fans are shook. "Yeah I'm a little bit scared guys," as one representative comment puts it.
It's starting to look like a repeat of Monster Hunter World's PC launch years ago, which came with its own questionable system requirements that allowed for a range of resolution targets, but no frame rate targets above 30 FPS. That didn't stop the PC version of World from being a hit, and we did get an uncapped frame rate, but the port's state at launch did prompt a big swath of negative reviews until Capcom implemented an array of patches.
Monster Hunter Rise's PC port fared markedly better at launch, but that was a game originally intended for the much less capable Switch hardware. We'll find out where Wilds lands in all this when it launches on February 27.
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