Earlier this year, Monster Hunter: World took the gaming community by storm, selling over five million copies during the course of its weekend debut and earning countless positive review scores. Now, it has been ported to the PC, and Steam users can get their hands on one of 2018's biggest hits. However, many PC ports in recent times have been poorly optimized, so I decided to check it out to see how it ran.
Here's what I found.
Read: Monster Hunter World review
Good framerate range and consistency
Armed with an Intel Core i7-8700K processor, an NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti graphics card, and 16GB of RAM memory, I dove into Monster Hunter: World at the highest settings with 1920 x 1200 resolution. With no framerate cap selected (you can cap at 30 or 60 if you want), Monster Hunter runs at 70 to 80 frames per second (FPS) on average. However, things get tricky during rare intensive moments. When exploring vast open areas or fighting gargantuan beasts, my FPS dipped down to around 45, with 38 marking the lowest point.
After tweaking settings, I discovered that the cause for this was volumetric lighting. Due to how high quality this lighting is, it would take a GTX 1080Ti to keep a consistently high framerate during the intensive moments. Thankfully, though, the game still looks fantastic with volumetric lighting off, and if you decide you want it, the occasional drop to 38 to 45 FPS isn't that jarring.
No stutters in sight
While the framerate had a few minor issues, one area where Monster Hunter didn't suffer at all is stuttering. During all of my hours of testing, my game never froze or struggled to render the game world in front of me. Considering stuttering is a fairly common occurrence in games ported to PC, this was a pleasant surprise.
Unfortunately, it can crash ...
While most of what I said has been positive, there is a flaw with this port that I would be remiss not to address: crashing to desktop. Thankfully, the crashes are few and far between (my game crashed three times over the course of the eight hours I spent with Monster Hunter) but the issue has the potential to screw up your game at any time.
Unlike the typical freezing or error popups that precede crashes, Monster Hunter simply closes itself abruptly. Two of my three crashes happened in non-intensive areas, so I'm ultimately not sure what is causing the problem. If you save often, you should be OK, though. Hopefully whatever is causing the crashes is patched soon.
Final thoughts on Monster Hunter: World's PC port
Despite the rare crash and the occasional dip in framerate, Monster Hunter: World runs well on PC overall. People who have lower specs than I do will be able to lower their settings in order to suit their needs thanks to the title's in-depth graphics options, and people with higher specs than me probably won't have much problem with FPS at all.
Monster Hunter: World is available now on Steam and Xbox One for $59.99. Make sure to check out our review of the game on Xbox One, too.
