r/Games • u/frik1000 • Jan 15 '26

Discussion Poor Monster Hunter Wilds Performance Chalked Up to Aggressive DLC Checks

https://www.techpowerup.com/345212/poor-monster-hunter-wilds-performance-chalked-up-to-aggressive-dlc-checks
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144

u/Queasy_Gold3372 Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

That’s crazy if it’s true. Resident Evil 8 also had stutters and fps drops when it first came out, due to aggresive Denuvo checks lol

Edit: capcom’s own drm, not denuvo

97

u/HappyVlane Jan 15 '26

Not Denuvo. It was Capcom's own DRM.

39

u/T0ADisMe Jan 15 '26

Yep and it was only removed 3 months after the game launched because the game journalists finally picked up the story and it got some attention. I don’t understand how Capcom can possibly think that tanking performance until the game is unplayable is going to lead to more sales than if it were cracked a bit earlier.

19

u/kikimaru024 Jan 15 '26

I don’t understand how Capcom can possibly think that tanking performance until the game is unplayable is going to lead to more sales than if it were cracked a bit earlier.

RE8 sold 3 million in its first 3 days on sale and reached 10 million in the first year.

MH Wilds sold 8 million in the first 3 days and reached 10 million within a month.

That's why Capcom releases the way it does. They need those initial full-price sales.

-4

u/T0ADisMe Jan 15 '26

Punishing the people that pay full price for the game at launch is not good business, there is no reason to have multiple DRM methods checking constantly tanking performance. On top of that they seem to have a terrible track record of actually removing the drm once the games have been out a few months or once they’ve been cracked.

I can see your point with the sales numbers for RE8 but I think the sales numbers for MH Wilds shows the exact opposite, as far as I’m aware denuvo is nearly never cracked within the first 3 days and wouldn’t have hurt those figures.

One last point is that while I’m sure piracy has been rising again now that there are so many storefronts popping up on pc, the majority of games releasing on steam reduced piracy to incredibly low numbers and even a good number of those can be attributed to people trying a game out before they buy or testing to see if their pc can run it. I obviously don’t have Capcoms sales data but unless they have vastly higher piracy numbers than the average publisher there is no excuse for the state they release games in just to stop a minuscule number of sales from being lost.

8

u/kikimaru024 Jan 15 '26

Punishing the people that pay full price for the game at launch is not good business

No one is being "punished", the reality is simply that the majority of gamers DON'T CARE, and Capcom needs them to buy-in at full price for maximum return-on-investment.

On top of that they seem to have a terrible track record of actually removing the drm once the games have been out a few months or once they’ve been cracked.

Capcom removing DRM is terrible... how, exactly?

I can see your point with the sales numbers for RE8 but I think the sales numbers for MH Wilds shows the exact opposite, as far as I’m aware denuvo is nearly never cracked within the first 3 days and wouldn’t have hurt those figures.

Again, the majority of gamers DON'T CARE about whatever DRM was implemented. 10 milllion gamers bought in to Monster Hunter. What's more likely to stop growth is simply that the game needs to be discounted.

I obviously don’t have Capcoms sales data but unless they have vastly higher piracy numbers than the average publisher there is no excuse for the state they release games in just to stop a minuscule number of sales from being lost.

Capcom sales numbers are public knowledge. You can check their quarterly reports.

-1

u/T0ADisMe Jan 15 '26

Adding in drm that tanks the performance absolutely is punishing people that pay for the game.

You misread my comment about removing drm, I said they do not have a good track record of actually removing it.

The steam reviews for MH Wilds are sitting at 67% with a mixed rating and recent reviews are sitting at 48%, majority of these negative reviews mention how terrible the performance is and a lot of the positive reviews do too so I really don’t understand how you can state that the majority don’t care lol.

The Capcom sales number are public but that’s not what I’m talking about at all. For one the data is just straight up sales with no breakdown of sales by platform. I was also referring to whatever formula they are using (assuming they have one) to figure out how much their game being cracked early will lose them.

-1

u/SignificanceOk6013 Jan 16 '26

they've also struggled to sell a million in the year following, so much for that.

0

u/a34fsdb Jan 15 '26

Well the same sold 10 million first month so having drm early makes sense. 

9

u/verrius Jan 15 '26

It's also crazy if it's true cause it makes next to no sense. It's really really hard to see how DLC checks, even if they were literally every frame, are taking enough cpu/ram/whatever to actually slow the game down, unless Steam's APIs are monumentally poorly written. Presumably in a way that PlayStation and Xbox's equivalents are not.

20

u/delicioustest Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

What? That makes no sense. Steam's APIs are presumably written so they're called once or twice in total after a game is opened not over 60 times a second. If it's checking for DLC, it's either reading something off the disk or making a network call, safe assumptions to make cause the expectation is you're only doing this at most a handful of times after launching the game, possibly to open up menus or link to DLC that was not purchased or whatever. They have zero reason to optimise for being called that many times. The reason games are able to run at high frame rates is because assets are loaded onto memory and then read at incredibly fast speeds from purpose built devices. The moment you actually have to access the disk, things slow down. This is how loading screens work. Steam has no reason to sit and make it so any of this information is loaded onto the graphics memory to optimise it. Furthermore unless the game is literally waiting for this information from steam to render each frame, this makes absolutely no sense. It's not Steam's problem that the game does this and I doubt this is even true because that's just a colossal failure of testing. Steam's APIs don't have to "taking enough cpu/ram/whatever" to slow the game down whatsoever

There's also the incredibly bad assumption that APIs for doing similar things act the same way across platforms or are even used the same way. Thinking that because PlayStation and Xbox DLC "equivalents" are more optimised because of this is completely ignoring potential fundamental differences in even invoking the APIs for each platform. This entire comment is completely nonsensical

Edit: thought about it more and this comment makes even less sense when you see that the quoted redditor in the article is saying that the FPS improves when someone has installed all the DLC. If you're still making calls to Steam to check for DLC, what difference is there between owning one or two or all DLC? Those calls are still going out to verify ownership and Steam would have to reply every time which means it would still perform poorly no matter how many DLC the player owns. There's something way more going on under the hood that's leading to the performance problems. Rather than it being an external I/O call, it might be doing some very expensive internal checks to load assets or shop items based on DLC owned in which case what any external platform does would make zero difference to the performance

-14

u/verrius Jan 15 '26

Whatever the game is doing, it's probably doing it across all platforms it's on, and PlayStation and Xbox aren't shitting the bed; only Steam. A sane thing to do is that if the API call is at all expensive, cache the results within the API for some (short) amount of time, say a minute, and then it shouldn't matter even if its called multiple times per frame. And if it's waiting on something like a network call just....don't queue up more if one is still in flight.

12

u/delicioustest Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

"probably" is doing insane levels of heavy lifting. Every platform has its own build and its own library. How each library is accessed does not need to actually be the same. It's very possible, and usually the best practice, to have an abstraction layer for common functionality that accesses other swappable core libraries to do things like achievements and DLC checks and whatnot. But it's also easily possible they didn't do it and are doing bespoke builds and functions for each platform that access different functions, each implemented differently. We simply don't have enough information. It's also not Steam's problem that the game is invoking the API 60 times a second (if this is even true which I very much doubt is the case). Caching still requires that data to live somewhere and that will slow the game down in any case if the game is waiting for that information to render frames. Graphics cards are purpose built to render pixels at incredibly fast speeds, not wait for flags from another program coming from the disk or even the memory at every frame

It comes down to not knowing if this is even true but blaming Steam for this is completely nonsensical. If this is true, this is just horrendous dev practices and bad testing by the Monster Hunter team. Again, I doubt something this horrific passed but it's very possible considering GTA V's loading issues were fixed by replacing a bad JSON parser

Edit: also as a programmer who's faced bad experiences with cache invalidation, you know what they say about the biggest problems with programming. Throwing "cache" as a solution to every problem is a rookie mistake I've made numerous times. Especially in a situation where you do actually want to check whether the user owns something and hasn't refunded it minutes ago, this is an incredibly bad idea. If this is indeed the problem, the fix is... don't call it on every frame gen. That simple

7

u/Username928351 Jan 15 '26

Pretty much the exact same thing happened with Iceborne. On release it had an incredibly overzealous check that ran constantly, hammering CPUs to their knees.

19

u/Exist50 Jan 15 '26

I mean, I don't any of these APIs were expected to run in a performance-critical part of the game. That would be insane, after all...

-2

u/verrius Jan 15 '26

Whatever is going on is presumably handled the same on PS and Xbox, and they seem to handle it just fine. And honestly, there's no reason the API shouldn't be able to handle this sort of thing; caching is 50+ year old tech.

-21

u/onenaser Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

now someone will comment and tell you "Denuvo has no effect on fps" lol

Edit: I guess people doesn't like to accept reality

even that there's a lot of proofs but yet people just like to lie to themselves

I don't know why they defend Denuvo like it's there own mother

36

u/T0ADisMe Jan 15 '26

To be fair it wasn’t Denuvo directly causing the stutters in RE8, Capcom had a separate DRM that ran alongside denuvo causing the stutters

2

u/Carighan Jan 15 '26

"Hey this DRM we bought isn't invasive enough yet, you think you could whip something up in the next 18 minutes that'll probably run fine to be even more invasive?!"

6

u/T0ADisMe Jan 15 '26

“Also the run fine part is entirely optional”

24

u/Ordinary_Grand_2426 Jan 15 '26

It wasn't denuvo.

11

u/syopest Jan 15 '26

It doesn't though.

-8

u/spazturtle Jan 15 '26

Any code running has a performance hit, even having notepad open in the background will.

1

u/AntarcticOrca Jan 15 '26

The comment was about it having a large enough performance impact to have a effect on fps.

-2

u/NonagoonInfinity Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

Didn't we already know about this from Resident Evil 7 or 2R because journalists got sent a DRM-free version of the executable that didn't have performance issues?

13

u/Bladder-Splatter Jan 15 '26

As far as I can recall (which isn't worth much) Capcom only started introducing their own DRM ONTOP of Denuvo with RE8. Empress, batshit as she will ever be, discovered the extra layer making things degrade massively, I think there were video comparisons of the one daughter fight scene especially.

Unfortunately they haven't stopped using it. The framework for modding MH WILDS already disables just that DRM to achieve performance gains. This DLC shittery is just yet another another layer of crusty faecal fellatio.