Monster Hunter World will be extremely CPU heavy on PC

Capcom’s Monster Hunter World is already one of 2018’s gaming highlights, selling over eight million copies across both PS4 and Xbox One before PC gamers even got a glimpse of the title running on their hardware.  

The PC version of the game is set to release on August 9th, though early players have already released a lot of detailed information about the game, confirming that the title lacks ultra-wide support, has a removable FPS cap and has textures and game assets that are on par with the game’s console versions.  

Early reports have also claimed that Monster Hunter World will be an extremely demanding PC release, especially when played using the title’s highest graphical presets, though, for the most part, this seems to be due to the title’s resource-heavy nature, especially on the CPU side. 

William Yagi-Bacon, Capcom USA’s VP of digital platforms, has stated that Monster Hunter World loads entire levels into memory to eliminate loading during gameplay, while also keeping track of monsters, collision detection, physics simulations and other background loads to deliver a seamless world. 

Capcom’s MT Framework engine is designed to distribute CPU cycles over all available cores and threads, making the engine well suited to modern high-core count Coffee Lake and Ryzen processors, as well as today’s 8-core PS4 and Xbox One consoles. The multi-threaded nature of the MT Framework engine means that users of modern high core count processors will have a much easier time achieving high framerates in Monster Hunter World. 

 

    To eliminate interstitial loading during active gameplay, MHW loads the entire level into memory. In addition to managing assets loaded into memory, it keeps track of monster interactions, health status, environment/object changes, manages LOD & object culling, calculates collision detection and physics simulation, and tons of other background telemetry stuff that you don’t see yet requires CPU cycle. This is in addition to supporting any GPU rendering tasks.

While the MT Framework engine has been around for ages, it does a good job in distributing CPU cycles and load-balancing tasks across all available cores and threads. The engine itself is optimized for x86 CPU instruction set, is highly scalable, and loosely speaking, is platform agnostic regardless of PC or console platform so as long as it conforms to the x86 instruction set.

 

 

Below are Monster Hunter World’s PC system requirements, which call for a minimum of an AMD R7 260X or Nvidia GTX 760 graphics card and either an Intel i5 4460 or an AMD FX 6300 or higher. In short, Bulldozer users should have at least six cores to run this game with playable framerates, and Intel users will require a Haswell processor or newer with at least four cores/threads. 

Capcom recommends that PC gamers have a minimum of four strong CPU cores with Hyperthreading/SMT (four cores and eight threads), suggesting Intel’s Ivy-Bridge i7 or AMD’s Ryzen 5 series CPUs or newer. This clearly shows the MT Framework Engine’s ability to use at least eight threads, which is great news for users of today’s high-end Intel/AMD processors.  

 

Monster Hunter World’s PC version is now available to pre-order on Steam. 

You can join the discussion on Monster Hunter World’s PC version on the OC3D Forums.