PSA: If Monster Hunter Wilds is crashing, try turning off frame generation

Monster Hunter Wilds is out in the, well, wild today, and giant lizards everywhere are suffering the predations of hunters with absurdly large weaponry. Unfortunately, if any of those hunters are having experiences like I did while playing for our Wilds review, they might be running into an unfortunate number of game crashes. Luckily, I was able to identify the potential culprit: If you’re getting a lot of Monster Hunter Wilds crashes on an Nvidia card, try disabling frame generation.

In the roughly 70 hours I played Wilds for review, the game generally ran well when I was following the story and initiating Field Survey hunts while roaming around the open wilderness regions. Starting a hunt that required a loading screen, however, caused consistent crashes. The crashes were particularly frequent when I accepted a quest from Alma that would require loading into a different region, both in singleplayer and—worse—when trying to hop into another player’s hunt online.

Particularly maddening, Wilds had a habit of crashing if I tabbed back in from another window right as its initial load into gameplay completed after startup. As a man with a pathological aversion to staring at a loading bar, this was torment.

After passing along my piling-up crash reports to Capcom, I did a search on the Wilds reviewers’ Discord for anyone else running into crashes. Seeing a few mentions of “frame gen crashes” in the results seemed like a promising lead: I’m on an Nvidia 40-series card, and I’d gotten healthy FPS increases in the prerelease benchmarks with frame generation enabled, so I’d switched it on for the review build.

Sure enough, disabling frame generation brought an immediate improvement. With frame gen switched off, I haven’t had a single crash during loads, and mercifully I’ve been able to tab back in after firing up the game without everything exploding.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like a patch has landed to address the issue before launch. After switching from the review beta to the launch branch on Steam, I reenabled frame gen just to see whether it’d still make a mess of things. I crashed on my very next load screen. You hate to see it.

At the very least, Capcom PR tells me that the dev team is aware of my reports. Hopefully, that means we’ll see a fix before long. Until then, if you’re on an Nvidia 40- or 50-series card and experiencing regular crashes, disabling frame gen is worth a try.

As for how different the experience is between frame gen enabled or disabled: On a 4070 Super with DLSS set to Quality and frame gen on, I’m getting around 140 fps on average in less graphically intensive areas and dropping down to upper 120-ish in spots with more shadows and vegetation. With frame gen off, those numbers drop to around 90 and 65 respectively—still plenty playable in my book, but a pretty substantial drop.

For additional performance tweaks and setting recommendations, be sure to check out our Monster Hunter Wilds graphics and performance report.