Buying all DLC for Monster Hunter Wilds unlocks twice the FPS performance — higher FPS accidentally paywalled by resource-hogging background check for paid content

A performance-crushing bug in Monster Hunter Wilds appears to vanish once all of the game's DLC is purchased and added to the game. Redditor de_Tylmarande highlighted this strange issue with the game, where DLC-rich folks can enjoy double the FPS compared to base game owners, and has been in touch with Capcom developer contacts.

Coincidentally, Capcom has just announced a performance patch is coming to the game, designed to reduce PC Steam “processing load.” The OP’s investigations pointed to aggressive background DLC ownership checks being the central performance issue.

de_Tylmarande was unhappy with Monster Hunter Wilds performance, explaining that “constant FPS drops where they should not exist at all were driving me crazy.” The OP had previously managed to iron out performance bugs in Capcom’s Dragon's Dogma 2, in collaboration with one of the company devs, so felt inspired to try again.

Initial investigations pointed to some sporadic CPU-sapping background process. In the OP’s case, it meant that the significant FPS dips were fixable by switching the gaming laptop to performance mode. But they weren’t satisfied with this noisy solution.

Research into the issue continued, but a breakthrough came by “pure accident.” de_Tylmarande was running the game using a friend’s Steam account (on the same laptop) and “everything was great.” They then spent some time making sure settings like DLSS, HD textures, caches, and other things remained the same when switching between accounts.

As the only difference began to become clear, “I refused to believe what I was seeing,” says the OP. The inescapable conclusion of the investigation was, “the more DLC you own, the better performance you get in the game.” Sherlock would be proud.

The performance delta isn’t negligible. de_Tylmarande experienced half/ double the performance between accounts with the base and full-DLC-loaded games. In A-B testing, “on the account with no DLC I get heavy and stable FPS drops down to like 20-25 in hubs, while on the account with all DLC bought it's 80+ FPS,” it is claimed.

Proving up the +DLC for +FPS theory

Carrying their investigations one further step forward, and so sniffing out a distributable solution in case Capcom doesn’t fix the issue, the Redditor created a mod to emulate owning all the DLC. de_Tylmarande stresses that this mod isn’t a hack to unlock unpaid for DLC.

With the mod loaded, “performance went through the roof.” Fooling the game into thinking you own all the DLC was a winning performance tuning strategy. The reason, reckons the OP, is simple. Performance was confirmed by the mod to be sapped by the “insanely crooked and aggressive DLC ownership check function” that Capcom has in place

After talking to Capcom contacts about their findings, de_Tylmarande says, “I hope we will see a huge performance fix soon.” The Redditor is not suggesting there was any bad intent on Capcom’s side, but just wants to highlight this bug and get it fixed for all users.

Indeed, we see the official Monster Hunter Status social media accounts today (embedded top) confirm that “Patch Ver.1.040.03.01 is set to go live on Steam January 27, 6 pm PST / January 28, 2 am GMT.” It is not specified that it addresses this particular wrinkle, but the wording “This patch will include optimization improvements for Steam-specific processes and options to reduce processing load,” certainly sounds like it.

There will be more stability and performance updates across all platforms, from a subsequent Ver. 1.041 update, released on February 18.

We have reached out to Capcom to get a definitive statement about the DLC check performance issues.

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