Strange but true, Capcom‘s game has a bug that affects PC players who don’t buy DLC the most.

We recently learned that Monster Hunter Wilds has frame rate issues on PC because the game checks for DLC ownership. The fewer DLCs a player has, the worse the frame rate becomes. This can be problematic, especially since dozens of cosmetic DLCs are available. Fortunately, after modder de_Tylmarande discovered this issue, Nexus Mods‘ Vaeux quickly released a fix in the form of a mod called “Less DLC Checks”. This mod requires Praydog‘s REFramework, which resolves various issues in games developed with Capcom‘s RE Engine.

Digital Foundry investigated the issue and found that the user’s computer was burdened with thousands of DLC checks, reducing the frame rate. However, this only occurs in a specific situation: when your character is in a central zone and one of the Support Desk NPCs is nearby. This is because these NPCs handle the DLC menu. Nevertheless, the modder’s claim is valid under the aforementioned conditions.

Richard Leadbetter, Digital Foundry‘s editor-in-chief, discovered that the performance increase provided by the Less DLC Checks mod was greater when the graphics settings were lowered on a test machine with a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU. At maximum settings (1440p Ultra with ray tracing enabled and the DLSS balanced preset), the performance increase was 11.4%. With ray tracing enabled at high settings, this increased to 20%. At the lowest settings with the DLSS ultra performance preset and no RT, the difference jumped to 25.6%.

The good news is that this problem only affects the PC performance of Monster Hunter Wilds under the aforementioned conditions. Capcom definitely needs to fix this issue as soon as possible. In a way, it’s impressive that a user discovered this amateur mistake almost a year after the game’s release.

Source: WCCFTech, Nexus Mods, Digital Foundry