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.
Heads up, hunters: Patch Ver.1.040.03.01 is planned to go live on Steam January 27, 6pm PST / January 28, 2am GMT.*Online sessions will not be discontinued once the update is available, allowing you to continue playing uninterrupted.This patch will include optimization…January 15, 2026
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.
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Proving up the +DLC for +FPS theory
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