Is ‘Monster Hunter Wilds’ played on Steam Deck?

I’m not happy to write this phrase so often over the past several months, but once again the latest AAA game is unplayable on Steam Deck. This time it’s Capcom’s highly expected Monster Hunter Wilds. I put the game’s newly released Benchmark tool Through the pace of my steam tire today and the results were disappointing.

First the good news – provided you have another PC beyond the steam deck to enjoy Monster Hunter Wilds on. Capcom has built the game with the respective image scaling solutions from AMD, NVIDIA and Intel. This means that as long as your system meets Updated minimum requirementsDo you have more than enough graphic adjustments to achieve a happy medium between good performance and pleasant visuals.

In addition, frame generation can be tilted further to improve framerates and ideally smooth out gameplay. But frame generation is not currently in the best shape on steam tires.

About Monster Hunter Wilds Benchmark

The benchmark tool is extensive, with multiple cutcenes in the engine with fast camera rocks and transitions, character review in the game and some beautiful aircraft-overs in the desert environment in the banned countries. It seems a decent representation of the overall requirements that will be placed on your CPU and GPU. You can see it in its entirety here.

I like to start all my steam deck test by establishing a baseline. What are the minimal graphics settings to hit a smooth, stable 30fps at the handheld original resolution of 1280×800? Preferably without enabling any kind of upscaling or framework generation technology.

So this is where we start. Note that I did my test with Proton Hotfix selected and use Steam Beta Branch.

Monster Hunter Wilds Performance on Steam Deck

Well, now it’s time for the bad news. Shooting the long monster Hunter Wilds -Benchmark at its lowest graphics preset, disable the FSR image upscaling and turn off AMD framework generation gives an average of 21FPS. Worse is that the game often dips down to 12fps.

Obviously, it is not a viable option and the game does not allow you to choose a resolution lower than the Steam Deck’s original resolution of 1280×800.

So next time I turned to AMD FSR and set up scaling up to ultra -performance. Again, there were big bits, and Framerate dips as low as 15fps. The benchmark race turned an average of 28 fps.

Still a bad view, but a little better! It was time to activate frame generation and cross your fingers. And here it becomes very important to see benchmark running for yourself, rather than just trusting someone (like me) to show you the end result.

Because when you run Monster Hunter Wilds Benchmark on his lowest settings on Steam Deck, with Image Upscaling Set To Ultra Performance and Frame Generation Enabled, you get what seems to be an acceptable result: 42FPS.

But in reality, the experience is exponentially worse. Here is a screen shot that shows frames in the same benchmark race:

The dramatic green spikes you see represent cruel tribal, and it is a constant throughout the benchmark race. This would be completely not -playful despite the average FPS result. Framework generation needs good data and decent framework to make a meaningful difference and it just doesn’t get these things.

So there you have it. In the lowest settings, even with performance increase such as image scaling and frame generation turned on, Monster Hunter Wilds is unfortunately not played on the steam deck. I hope this changes, perhaps with some valve developing magic or extra optimization from Capcom.

Monster Hunter Wilds will release February 27, and two Open Betas run over the next two weekends, starting on Thursday, February 6 at 1 p.m. 19.00 Pacific Time.