Monster Hunter Wilds — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 6% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Texture Quality at High (6% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: RE Engine streams texture mips into a managed VRAM pool. In Wilds, High loads 2K surface maps for terrain, foliage, and monster skin, while Ultra promotes key assets to 4K — particularly monster hide materials with multi-layer albedo, normal, and roughness maps. The framerate cost is near-zero when VRAM is sufficient, but dropping below the pool budget mid-hunt (common at 1080p with 6 GB cards at Ultra) causes visible stutter as the engine evicts and re-streams mips. Keep at High if your VRAM headroom is under 1 GB.

Typical impact 8-25% · 14% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (14% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: Wilds uses cascaded shadow maps for the primary directional light across its large open biomes. Ultra increases cascade resolution to 4096-texel maps with additional splits that extend soft-shadow coverage into the far field — critical for the wide vistas of the Windward Plains but expensive. Dropping from Ultra to High cuts shadow map resolution and cascade count noticeably, saving 10–18% GPU frame time. Medium reduces contact-shadow precision on monster bodies, which is visible but acceptable during fast combat.

Typical impact 20-50% · no measurable cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: RE Engine implements ray-traced ambient occlusion and reflections via DXR on the GPU's RT cores, building a scene BVH over both static geometry and dynamic monster meshes. At High, RT AO and reflections are evaluated at near-full resolution with a high ray budget per pixel. Medium halves the ray count and uses a denoiser to reconstruct. Even Low has a substantial cost — 20–35% GPU overhead depending on scene complexity — because Wilds' dense jungle and cave geometry produces deep BVH traversal. Disable entirely for competitive frame rates; the rasterized AO fallback is high quality.

Typical impact 3-12% · 6% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (6% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: With ray tracing off, Wilds falls back to a screen-space GTAO implementation running as a fullscreen compute pass. High uses a wide multi-directional horizon search with 32+ samples per pixel, producing accurate soft shadows in crevices of monster scales and between rock formations in the Oilwell Basin. Medium drops to roughly half the sample count with a temporal filter to compensate. Low is a basic SSAO pass. The quality difference between Low and High is clearly visible on textured rock surfaces and under dense foliage canopy.

Typical impact 5-18% · 8% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (8% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: The Scarlet Forest and Oilwell Basin biomes rely heavily on volumetric fog for atmosphere. RE Engine allocates a 3D froxel volume and ray-marches through it per pixel, sampling shadow maps at each step using the Henyey-Greenstein phase function. High increases froxel resolution and step count, producing dense, responsive god-ray shafts when monsters disturb the fog. Medium reduces froxel grid density noticeably — light shafts become blockier. Off removes participating-media rendering entirely, killing 8–15% GPU cost but making the Scarlet Forest look flat and uncharacteristic.

Typical impact 3-15% · 10% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Effect Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls the visual fidelity of gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, ability VFX, and environmental interactions. Higher settings increase particle emitter counts per effect, use higher-resolution flipbook or mesh particles instead of simple sprites, enable GPU particle simulation via compute shaders, and add dynamic lighting from effects (each explosion spawning a temporary point light). The cost is highly variable — intense combat with multiple overlapping effects can produce 4-8x overdraw from layered transparent particles.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: Monster ability effects in Wilds — Doshaguma herd stampedes, Quematrice fire trails, Nu Udra ink bursts — use GPU-simulated particle systems dispatched via compute shaders with dynamic point lights spawned per explosion. Ultra runs emitters at maximum particle count with lit mesh particles and full-resolution depth-sorted transparency. During large multi-monster hunts Ultra can spike frame time by 5–12 ms from layered transparent overdraw alone. Medium reduces particle count per emitter and reverts mesh particles to billboard sprites, keeping visual density high while cutting the peak overdraw load meaningfully.

Typical impact 5-18% · 10% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Mesh Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls the geometric complexity of world meshes including player-built structures, destructible environments, and static world geometry. Higher settings load denser mesh LODs with more triangles and finer tessellation on curved surfaces. In Rust (Unity), this determines polygon count for player-built structures — a large base with hundreds of foundations, walls, and roofs at high mesh quality generates enormous vertex buffer sizes and draw call counts. In RE Engine (MH Wilds) and Frostbite (Battlefield), mesh quality affects destruction debris polygon count and how many individual debris fragments are spawned.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: RE Engine mesh quality in MH Wilds controls monster model detail — Ultra renders full-detail scales, fur, and feathers. The Rotten Vale-style areas are heaviest.

Typical impact 5-18% · 12% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Vegetation Quality at High (12% fps cost).

Controls density, draw distance, and model complexity of all vegetation (grass, bushes, flowers, ferns). The engine uses GPU instancing or indirect draw calls to render thousands of vegetation instances. Higher settings increase instance count per square meter, push the draw distance further, and use higher-poly plant meshes. The primary GPU cost comes from massive overdraw — vegetation cards are alpha-tested, and dense foliage layers produce 4-8x overdraw. Wind animation adds per-vertex ALU cost in the vertex shader.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: Windward Plains has extremely dense vegetation that interacts with monster physics. Ultra is one of the heaviest settings in the game.

Typical impact 2-15% · 1% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at FXAA (1% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: TAA in RE Engine uses motion vectors and temporal accumulation with sub-pixel jitter to reconstruct stable edges on monster geometry and foliage. In Wilds it is the recommended baseline when not using an upscaler — the high geometric complexity of fur-covered monsters and dense leaf geometry produces severe shimmer without temporal filtering. FXAA is a single-pass edge blur that eliminates the worst aliasing at very low cost but softens fine surface detail on scales and armor. Off is only practical when DLSS or XeSS temporal upscaling is active, as those provide their own anti-aliasing pass.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: DLSS in Wilds runs on Tensor Cores and feeds RE Engine's motion vectors and depth buffer into NVIDIA's transformer-based reconstruction network. Quality mode (67% native resolution) is the recommended starting point — monster surface materials and particle effects hold up well under reconstruction at this ratio. Balanced and Performance push internal resolution lower, where fine fur detail on creatures like the Doshaguma begins to lose fidelity at close camera range. Ultra Performance is best reserved for 4K display owners accepting some reconstruction artifacts. DLSS Ray Reconstruction is not confirmed in Wilds, so standard denoising applies to RT output.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: FSR 3's temporal upscaling in Wilds uses a multi-pass compute shader pipeline with motion vector dilation and Lanczos-based reconstruction — no dedicated AI hardware required, so it runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel GPUs equally. Quality mode is well-suited to Wilds' material complexity, though RE Engine's fine fur and alpha-tested foliage can produce occasional temporal shimmer at FSR Balanced and below due to the absence of dedicated Tensor hardware for network inference. FSR is the go-to upscaler on AMD RDNA 3 hardware where it pairs naturally with FSR Frame Generation.

Typical impact -25-65% · no measurable cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, the recommended preset leaves Intel XeSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Intel Xe Super Sampling — a temporal upscaling technology that uses machine learning inference to reconstruct high-resolution frames from lower-resolution input. On Intel Arc GPUs, XeSS runs on dedicated XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) AI accelerator hardware. On non-Intel GPUs, XeSS falls back to a DP4a (dot product of 4 8-bit integers) shader implementation that runs on standard compute units. The neural network takes the current low-resolution color buffer, motion vectors, depth, and responsive masks as input. Quality mode renders at ~77% of native, Performance at ~50%.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: XeSS runs on Intel Arc via dedicated XMX matrix accelerators, and falls back to a DP4a compute implementation on AMD and NVIDIA hardware. In Wilds, the DP4a path produces competitive results at Quality mode — RE Engine provides clean motion vectors and a stable depth buffer which XeSS's temporal accumulation uses effectively. On Arc GPUs the XMX path produces sharper reconstruction on monster texture detail. Quality and Ultra Quality modes are recommended; XeSS Performance in Wilds can introduce ghosting artifacts on fast-moving weapon swings and monster limbs.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, the recommended preset leaves Frame Generation off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Synthesizes entirely new intermediate frames between real rendered frames using optical flow analysis. DLSS Frame Generation (NVIDIA Ada+) uses the Optical Flow Accelerator hardware to compute per-pixel motion between consecutive frames, then a neural network generates a synthetic frame by warping and blending the two surrounding real frames. AMD FSR Frame Generation uses a software-based optical flow compute shader implementation. The generated frame is inserted between real frames, effectively doubling perceived framerate. The trade-off is approximately 1 frame of additional display latency and potential artifacts on fast-moving objects where optical flow estimation fails.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: MH Wilds supports both DLSS Frame Gen and FSR Frame Gen. Essential for 60FPS at 4K Ultra. Adds ~1 frame of latency — acceptable for action RPG combat.

Typical impact 1-5% · 1% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Motion Blur at On (1% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: Wilds' motion blur is a post-process pass that samples the motion vector buffer written during the geometry pass, tracing 8–16 taps per pixel along each pixel's velocity vector. It is most prominent during fast Insect Glaive aerial combos and camera pans across wide biomes. The GPU cost is a single fullscreen pass — modest, roughly 1–3 ms — but many players disable it entirely for cleaner visual feedback during frame-precise dodge timing. The setting is purely aesthetic with no gameplay penalty for disabling.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In Monster Hunter Wilds, we recommend Depth of Field at On (1% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Monster Hunter Wilds: Wilds uses depth of field primarily in cutscenes and during some weapon finisher camera moments rather than continuous gameplay blurring. RE Engine's DoF implementation evaluates a circle of confusion per pixel from the depth buffer and applies a physically-based bokeh gather blur — cost scales with the maximum CoC radius used in cinematic shots. During open gameplay the effect is minimal and the frame time impact is negligible. Disabling it removes the cinematic focus pull in story cutscenes but has no meaningful FPS impact during hunts.