Redditor claims that Monster Hunter Wilds runs better 'the more DLC you own', and it does—but not by much on my machine

Monster Hunter Wilds is somewhat infamous for its performance woes, leading its Steam user rating to drop to "Mixed" since release thanks to a host of reported technical issues. However, redditor de_Tylmarande recently posted a potential fix—a homebrewed mod that skips a DLC check, which is said to massively boost performance.

They claim to have first noticed the performance improvements when swapping between a friend's account with all the DLC enabled and their own, and noticing that the game ran significantly better on the former. According to de_Tylmarande, their mod doesn't actually unlock any of the DLC, but instead skips the check confirming it is present, subverting a system-heavy process and leading to a major frame rate boost.

MH Wilds - Bad performance mystery (Solved?) from r/MonsterHunter

"The more DLC you own, the better performance you get in the game", claims the redditor. "On the account with no DLC I get heavy and stable FPS drops down to like 20-25 in hubs, while on the account with all DLC bought its 80+ FPS."

To test out this DLC-boosting theory, I performed some benchmarking runs of my own, both on a fresh, DLC-less copy of the game, and one with all 189 (!) DLC options installed. Actually, there are technically 190 DLC entries for Monster Hunter Wilds, but like de_Tylmarande, I left out the high resolution texture pack.

And the results? On average, over multiple runs around the first camp area, I gained a whole... six frames per second on average, boosting my results from 61 fps to 67 overall. Running missions appeared to make no difference to the frames, as all my testing data ended up with a two fps margin of error—and in terms of stuttering, I noticed no perceivable difference. The 1% lows remained virtually the same, but yes, it did run faster overall. Just not by a whole lot.

Now, a six fps gain might not sound like much, but there are a few things to take into account here. Firstly, I did this testing on my home machine, an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X system with an RTX 5070 Ti in the GPU slot. It's certainly a whole lot quicker than the Intel Core i7-12800HX-equipped gaming laptop de_Tylmarande used to record their results, with an RTX 3070 Ti mobile.

It's entirely possible that these gains scale logarithmically, and that older/less well-specced PCs may see a much more significant difference. It's also possible that the mod affects something else within the game engine that leads to a large performance jump, alongside the bypass of the DLC check.

I recorded my results at 4K using the High preset (which defaults DLSS to Balanced) and frame generation set to off, making sure to pass Conut, the in-game DLC vendor, at the same point in every pass.

A potential theory accounting for these performance gains might lie with this furry friend. It's possible that passing near Conut (or entering a camp where they're based, which I did on each of my main runs), might cause the game to rifle through the installed DLC, which could drop the frame rate as a result. With all the DLC installed, no DLC check, more performance. So the theory goes, at least.

I wasn't able to record any significant drops by being in Cronut's near-vicinity, although my frame rate did dip by around 10 fps when entering the camp from the open world, DLC or not. This isn't too much of a surprise, as the hub is full of NPCs and visual effects—but it's possible that the DLC dip is contained within this frame rate drop, and is more significant on lower-specced machines.

So, would I recommend you buy an astonishing amount of DLC to improve your Monster Hunter Wilds performance? Based on my own quick testing, no. It's very interesting, though, that the frame rate is improved by loading up the game with all the extra bolt-ons, even if that improvement is small on my particular test machine.

It sure feels like a bug to me, although in my case, a relatively insignificant one. de_Tylmarande says they've reached out to Capcom with their data, and that if it doesn't "fix this mess", they'll finish the mod and release it as an open source option.

In the meantime, our Nick has put together a comprehensive guide to the best PC settings for Monster Hunter Wilds, and it's there where you're likely to find the biggest frame rate gains. Monster Hunter Wilds is still a very demanding game, even with multiple updates since its release—and while there's unlikely to be a "magic bullet" for performance woes, it seems the devs might still have some work to do on the bug hunting front.