‘Monster Hunter Wilds’ Is Unplayable On Steam Deck

I’m not happy about writing this sentence so frequently during the last several months, but once again the latest AAA game is unplayable on Steam Deck. This time around, it’s Capcom’s highly anticipated Monster Hunter Wilds. I put the game’s newly released benchmark tool through the paces on my Steam Deck OLED today, and the results were disappointing.

First, the good news – provided you have another PC besides the Steam Deck to enjoy Monster Hunter Wilds on. Capcom has built the game with the respective image upscaling solutions from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. This means that as long as your system meets the updated minimum requirements, you’ll have more than enough graphic tweaks to achieve a happy medium between good performance and enjoyable visuals.

On top of that, Frame Generation can be flipped on to improve framerates and ideally smooth out gameplay. But frame generation isn’t currently in the best shape on Steam Deck.

About The Monster Hunter Wilds Benchmark

The benchmark tool is comprehensive, featuring multiple in-engine cutscenes with quick camera cuts and transitions, in-game character traversal, and some beautiful fly-overs of the desert environment of The Forbidden lands. It seems a decent representation of the overall demands that will be placed on your CPU and GPU. You can watch it in its entirety here.

I like to start all of my Steam Deck testing by establishing a baseline. What are the minimum graphics settings to hit a smooth, steady 30FPS at the handheld’s native resolution of 1280×800? Preferably without enabling any kind of upscaling or frame generation tech.

So that’s where we begin. Note that I did my testing with Proton Hotfix selected, and am using the Steam Beta branch.

Monster Hunter Wilds Performance On Steam Deck

Well, now it’s time for the bad news. Firing up the lengthy Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark at its lowest graphics preset, disabling FSR image upscaling, and turning off AMD frame generation yields an average of 21FPS. Worse still, the game often dips down to 12FPS.

Clearly, that’s not a viable option, and the game doesn’t allow you to choose a resolution lower than the Steam Deck’s native resolution of 1280×800.

So next I flipped on AMD FSR and set the upscaling mode to Ultra Performance. Again, there were major stutters, and framerate dips as low as 15FPS. The benchmark run turned in an average of 28FPS.

Still a poor showing, but slightly better! It was time to activate Frame Generation and cross my fingers. And here’s where it becomes very important to see the benchmark running for yourself, rather than just trusting someone (like me) to show you the end result.

Because when you run the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark at its lowest settings on Steam Deck, with image upscaling set to Ultra Performance, and Frame Generation enabled, you’ll get what appears to be an acceptable result: 42FPS.

But in reality, the experience is exponentially worse. Here’s a screenshot showing frametimes during that same benchmark run:

Those dramatic green spikes you see represent atrocious stuttering, and it’s a constant throughout the entire benchmark run. This would be utterly unplayable despite the average FPS result. Frame Generation needs good data and decent framerates to make a meaningful difference, and it’s just not getting those things.

So, there you have it. At the lowest settings, even with performance boosts like image upscaling and frame generation turned on, Monster Hunter Wilds is, sadly, unplayable on the Steam Deck. I hope this changes, perhaps with some Valve developer magic or extra optimization from Capcom.

Monster Hunter Wilds releases February 27, and two open betas will be running across the next two weekends, beginning Thursday, February 6.