Is Monster Hunter Wilds' borked PC performance because of a spelling error in the game's config files? Probably not
Monster Hunter Wilds players are so desperate to improve the game's atrocious performance issues that many jumped on a supposed fix this weekend, claiming repairing a typo can result in an FPS boost. But based on our own testing, as well as follow-up conversations on social media, a true fix for Wilds' issues lies elsewhere.
It's been a rough launch weekend for Wilds with a wave of complaints about poor PC performance, especially when it comes to graphics quality. Capcom released a troubleshooting guide on February 28, but the unusually poor graphics performance doesn't appear in the developer's "Currently known issues" page at the time of writing.
So, users are digging into the Wilds game files to search for a fix and for a second, it looked like they found one. But I'm not so sure after putting it to the test.
On Saturday, a Wilds player shared a post in the Steam forums pointing out a typo in the game's "config.ini" file that had "Resolution" misspelled as "Resoltuion." The post claimed that fixing the typo seemed to result in an FPS boost.
The "config.ini" file is a plain text file that's basically used to keep track of settings and preferences in the game. The easiest way to find it is to go into Steam and right click on "Monster Hunter Wilds" in your library then select "Manage" then "Browse local files." The "config.ini" file should be near the top of your main Monster Hunter Wilds folder. If you open the file and scroll down to nearly the end of it, you can look for the typo about halfway down the [RenderConfig] section in a line that reads: "MinimumStreamingTextureResolution=MinimumStreamingTextureResoltuion_256."
Some users on Steam, as well as Reddit, claimed that fixing the typo in this line noticeably increased their FPS, but others said they saw no significant change or the file reverted back to the typo version after re-launching the game.
I tested out this fix myself and unfortunately the latter was also my experience. I averaged about 120 FPS before the fix and got the exact same average after fixing the typo and saving the tweaked "config.ini" file. The typo also reappeared after I launched the game. Some users have suggested setting the "config.ini" file to "read-only" to force the typo fix to stay in effect, but that blocks Wilds from updating other settings changes in the "config.ini" file.
On top of that, it looks like this typo may not be the issue at all. Users on Reddit and Steam alike have spotted the same "Resoltuion" typo in the game's executable file, meaning the code in the config file works despite the misspelled word. Typos happen from time to time in coding and sometimes programmers simply continue referring to a misspelled variable rather than sifting through their code to fix it everywhere, which could be the case here.
So, unfortunately it looks like this "fix" is a placebo. Hopefully Capcom addresses the graphics performance in Wilds with an official fix soon, because it truly is shockingly poor, even with the graphics set to "High" and the game running on high-end hardware. For now, the wildest part of the Monster Hunter Wilds experience seems to be graphical glitches.
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