Monster Hunter stutter fixed on 8GB by uncompressing textures
Monster Hunter Wilds has been a headache on PC since launch, with stutter and texture pop in on midrange hardware. Months later there is still no official fix from Capcom (I guess it’s safe to assume there won’t be any). The worst case has been 8GB GPUs, which must choose between blurry medium textures or high textures that cause constant hitching. A new community mod built on RE Framework now targets that exact problem. Digital Foundry tested the mod and reports that it removes much of the texture driven stutter on 8GB cards.
Earlier testing suggested that the core problem was not raw VRAM capacity but how the game streams texture data. Wilds uses GDeflate compression with DirectStorage style decompression handled on the GPU , even though the menu claims CPU decompression. That extra work appears during fast camera movement as short, regular frame time spikes. Even 12GB cards can show similar spikes, only with enough raw power to hide them in average frame rate charts. Lowering texture quality reduces VRAM use but does not stop those spikes.
Source: Digital Foundry
The new mod beats this system by unpacking the game’s high preset textures ahead of time. Players install the latest RE Framework build and enable the Loose File Loader option in game. They then run the separate MHW Tex Decompressor tool in the game folder. This replaces the default compressed texture archives with uncompressed versions and keeps the originals as backups. The change increases the base texture footprint from around 24 GB to about 41 GB on disk.
Source: Digital Foundry
On an RTX 4060 with 8GB of VRAM, Digital Foundry shows a clear change in frame time graphs once the mod is active. The same high texture preset now runs without the repeatable camera turn stutter seen in cutscenes and early hub areas. Frame times stay steadier and the game no longer swings between smooth and choppy states in the same scene. The trade-off is more PCIe traffic and higher disk use (as shown below), because the GPU now receives larger uncompressed texture uploads instead of decoding smaller GDeflate blocks in the middle of gameplay. The mod does not change ray tracing performance and does not make heavy effects suddenly viable on low end GPUs.
Source: Digital Foundry
Digital Foundry notes that this disk space for performance trade-off already exists in some official PC ports, such as God of War Ragnarok with its large install and uncompressed textures. So perhaps GPU texture decompression wasn’t such a great idea after all?
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