Monster Hunter Wilds runs faster on accounts with more DLC, report claims
A new community investigation claims Monster Hunter Wilds performance can swing hard based on DLC ownership, even on the same PC with identical settings. The Redditor who brought the problem to light says one Steam account with no DLC dropped to roughly 2025 FPS in hub areas, while a second account that owns many or all cosmetic packs held 80+ FPS in the same locations.
The reported culprit is a DLC ownership check that appears to hit the CPU far harder when the account owns little or nothing. Redditor describes the behavior as counterintuitive. More listed DLC entries allegedly reduce the amount of work the check performs, which improves frame rate on mid-range and lower-end CPUs.
To rule out normal variables, tests were repeated under controlled conditions. Settings, save progression, location, camera angle, and software versions were kept the same. The poster also claims the results were reproduced across multiple different PCs, not just one system.
Source: Reddit
To double-check the theory, the Redditor says a temporary research workaround was used to skip the heavy part of the DLC check without unlocking anything. Performance reportedly jumped right away, even with the CPU still running at the same clocks. The gains were close to linear up to around 100 DLC entries, then started to level off once the GPU became the main limit.
Source: Reddit
If all of this holds up, it looks like a messy optimization bug rather than something done on purpose. A few people pointed out how this could slip through internal testing if dev and QA builds default to “all DLC unlocked,” which would avoid the slow path entirely. The poster also called out lots of Steam API calls as another area that might be worth looking at.
The findings were sent to Capcom support, and Digital Foundry has already reached out to follow up.
Source: de_tylmarande/Reddit via KAMI
