Monster Hunter Rise PC: A Technical Disaster

Capcom's latest release is a chart-topper, currently ranking 6th on Steam's most-played list. However, this success is overshadowed by widespread criticism regarding the game's technical performance on PC. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis confirms these concerns, revealing a deeply flawed PC port.

Their findings highlight numerous issues. Shader pre-compilation, a crucial process, takes an agonizing 9 minutes on a high-end 9800X3D system, stretching to over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Texture quality is disappointingly low, even at the "High" setting. Testing on an RTX 4060 at 1440p with balanced DLSS revealed significant frame time spikes, a jarring experience for players. Even the more powerful RTX 4070 struggles, producing noticeably poor textures.

For GPUs with only 8GB of VRAM, Digital Foundry recommends reducing texture quality to "Medium" to alleviate stuttering and frame time spikes. Sadly, this compromise still leaves much to be desired visually. Rapid camera movements continue to cause noticeable performance hiccups, although less severe with slower movements. Crucially, the frame time issues persist even with low-quality textures.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia points to inefficient data streaming as the likely culprit. This places an immense burden on the GPU during decompression, especially impacting budget graphics cards and causing those frustrating frame time spikes. He strongly advises against purchasing the game for systems with 8GB GPUs and expresses reservations even about more powerful cards like the RTX 4070.

Intel GPU users face particularly dire performance. The Arc 770, for instance, manages only 15-20 frames per second, plagued by missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-end systems can partially mitigate these problems, a consistently smooth experience remains elusive. Currently, finding optimal settings is nearly impossible without sacrificing significant visual fidelity.