Monster Hunter Wilds has earned itself a reputation for poor performance and optimization, and, while successive post-launch updates have helped improve things somewhat, it appears as though part of the problem, especially when it comes to mid-range hardware, is related to how Monster Hunter Wilds checks for DLC content. According to Reddit user u/de_Tylmarande, after significant testing and comparing performance in two different Steam accounts, the user discovered that Capcom has a DLC ownership check constantly running in the background that accounts for at least some of the performance degradation. According to the redditor’s testing, the more DLC registered to a user’s account, the less performance degradation there is.
u/de_Tylmarande validated their testing by implementing a mod that disables the check. In their specific case, using the mod resulted in an astounding performance increase of upwards of 75%—26 FPS with the mod disabled and 46 FPS with the mod enabled in the same busy hub scene. Crucially, this mod and bug admittedly seem to have the biggest impact on performance when using mid-range hardware, since allowing for the extra CPU overhead seems to minimize the impact of the bug. It’s unclear whether this is simply a bug, or if Capcom is deliberately being aggressive with the checks for some reason, but a number of performance-oriented patches have been issued for the game since its February 2025 launch, without any fixes for the aforementioned DLC check, so it seems unlikely that Capcom is unaware of a potential bug that was discovered by an enterprising redditor in their free time. More performance optimizations are promised for the game in 2026, and the Reddit user has promised to publish their mod that disables the DLC check if Capcom doesn’t fix the performance problems related to the check.
