Buying more Monster Hunter Wilds DLC genuinely improves PC performance, multiple tests find

One Monster Hunter Wilds player reckons they've found the key to its performance woes, as they notice improved performance when all the DLC is enabled.

Monster Hunter Wilds' PC performance (and really, performance in general) has somewhat killed the momentum of Capcom's latest. And while the company has been taking steps to fix it, it's still not in a great place. However, fans have also been searching for ways to get to the bottom of the game's issues, and one Reddit user seems to have uncovered something bizarre.

In a post on Reddit, user de_Tylmarande – who claims to have discovered a similar performance issue in Dragon's Dogma 2 – shared an extensive writeup detailing their discovery. It's a massive post that goes into a ton of detail, but the key is that they noticed a discrepancy in performance when logging into their friend's account to play the game versus their own, and soon realized that the only difference was that their friend owned all of the game's cosmetic DLC.

Clocking this, de_Tylmarande then modded their own game to make the game think they owned all of the DLC content (without actually unlocking the DLC content, to avoid piracy), and their own game suddenly performed much better, with the user releasing a video showing the difference in performance, with FPS in towns jumping up significantly, with the claim being that the performance issues are down to extensive checks from the game to see if players own DLC.

And while "you need to buy all $500+ DLC to make the game run better" is a horrible look on paper, de_Tylmarande says they don't believe Capcom did this on purpose; rather, it seems like a bug in the code that the company needs to fix. However, they did say that "if Capcom don't fix this mess," they'll look into releasing the mod that they used to bypass the DLC checks.

Multiple independent outlets have tested this since, with Digital Foundry and Rock Paper Shotgun reporting FPS gains in multiple situations and on varying GPUs after purchasing a whole load of DLC. This isn't a night-and-day fix that doubles your FPS and solves all the game's processing issues, but potentially boosting your frame rate by upwards of 10% for buying Gemma skins sure is something.

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