Monster Hunter Wilds PC Performance Reportedly Jumps From 20 FPS To 80 FPS After Modder Bypasses Constant DLC Ownership Checks

Monster Hunter Wilds has faced persistent criticism over its PC performance since Capcom launched the game nearly 1 year ago, and while multiple official updates and community fixes have improved stuttering and frame pacing, a new community discovery suggests there may have been a hidden performance drain in plain sight.

Soon after launch, well known modder Praydog released a new version of REFramework aimed at reducing stuttering tied to the game’s anti tampering behavior. In April 2025, a texture decompressor tool also surfaced to reduce stutters caused by real time decompression. Capcom then attempted to improve performance over time, including adding NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation and AMD FSR 4 support in Title Update 2 in late June. Even with those upgrades, performance complaints persisted, and the situation escalated into player harassment that led Capcom to cancel a technical lecture planned for CEDEC 2025 in Japan.

More recently, Title Update 4 reportedly delivered over 100 additional performance improvements and helped stabilize many of the remaining critical issues. However, one major problem allegedly remained: the game appears to constantly check whether the player owns every piece of released DLC, and the more DLC a player does not own, the worse performance becomes.

Reddit user De Tylmarande claims to have identified this behavior through repeatable testing using 2 Steam accounts on identical hardware in a post on Reddit testing report. According to the report, the accounts produced dramatically different results under controlled conditions:

Account 1 with base game only showed severe FPS drops, including 20 to 25 FPS in hubs
Account 2 with all DLC installed ran smoothly at 80 plus FPS

The user says variables like character appearance, location, time of day, graphics settings, and drivers were controlled, leaving DLC ownership as the only meaningful difference. They also report that switching between accounts consistently replicated the performance gap.

De Tylmarande then created a small mod that tricks the game into recognizing all DLC as owned without actually unlocking content, and they claim performance increased immediately.

If accurate, this is a brutal optics hit for a premium PC release. A background entitlement validation loop that scales cost based on missing DLC would be the kind of oversight that can quietly erode performance across the entire player base, especially for players who only own the base game. The report also notes that Digital Foundry has reached out and may publish an independent analysis, which could help validate the findings and pressure a formal fix if the issue is confirmed.

For now, the takeaway is clear: Monster Hunter Wilds may have improved substantially through updates, but the remaining performance story might hinge on a single expensive check loop that should never have shipped in a state that penalizes non buyers of add on content.

Do you think Capcom should prioritize an emergency hotfix for this, or wait until it can be fully validated and rolled into the next major title update?