Monster Hunter Wilds is unfortunately hardly playable on the Steam Deck.
Monster Hunter Wilds is released on February 28, 2025. The high system requirements have been a big issue since the open beta last November at the latest. Many players complained about poor performance.
This is not good news, especially for players who want to hunt monsters on a gaming handheld like the Steam Deck. Now Capcom has released a benchmarking tool. The game works – but it can hardly be described as playable.
Why this is important: Monster Hunter is a game series that has enjoyed great popularity among handheld gamers thanks to versions on the PlayStation Portable, the Nintendo 3DS or the Nintendo Switch. The next installment is unlikely to be playable at all on the most popular PC handheld, the Steam Deck.
In detail: Even at the lowest settings and an 800p resolution, it is not possible to achieve a stable 30 frames per second with the Steam Deck.
A player from the Steam Deck community tested the game with an internal resolution of 213 x 132, upscaled to 640 x 400 pixels. This allowed an average of about 30 FPS to be achieved, but the game graphics looked correspondingly poor.
Monster Hunter Wilds] 213×132 internal resolution, all lowest settings
byu/gonuxgo inSteamDeck
We tried it ourselves with a Steam Deck LCD model and were able to confirm the poor performance. The game is “playable”, but it would probably be fun for only a few.
- With the lowest settings, 800p resolution, and FSR Ultra performance, an average frame rate of 25.53 FPS could be achieved.
- The game also looked very pixelated.
We also tried the benchmark with the same settings on a Lenovo Legion Go and a Zotac Zone, both of which have faster gaming hardware.
- On the Lenovo Legion Go, the benchmark always crashes during shader compilation. According to the Legion Go subreddit, an average frame rate of 38 FPS can be expected with the lowest settings and 800p resolution.
- On the Zotac Zone, the benchmark does not crash for us. With the same settings and a 720p resolution, an average of 43 FPS is achieved.
Editor’s opinion
Monster Hunter Wilds is one of my most anticipated titles of this year and I would love to play the game on a handheld like the old days. I can probably rule out the Steam Deck.
The game is playable on gaming handhelds with AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme or equivalent processor, but it’s not particularly beautiful. At least you can switch on FSR 3 frame generation in the game or use the Lossless Scaling app to generate additional images. However, both come at the cost of input latency and cause image artifacts such as ghosting.
If you want to enjoy the best possible Monster Hunter Wilds experience on a handheld device, i.e. smooth performance coupled with high image quality, you probably only have two options:
- Remote or cloud gaming on a handheld or mobile device with a controller. However, with this method, you will also have to accept input lag and image artifacts.
- Wait for a gaming handheld with Ryzen Z2 Extreme or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. These handhelds will have a bit more gaming power. This way, you can either achieve better frame rates or choose higher graphics settings. For example, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 or the Ayaneo 3 are conceivable.
Did you plan to play Monster Hunter Wilds on a gaming handheld like the Steam Deck? Will you do it anyway or are you put off by the low performance? Feel free to let us know in the comments!
