Monster Hunter World PC Port’s CPU-Heavy Nature Explained

Capcom’s Monster Hunter World is due to release on PC in August after much fanfare. Despite not featuring post-launch content like Deviljho and Lunastra at launch, the title quickly rose to first place on the Steam Top Sellers list when its release date was first announced. We even had a look at some PC gameplay to determine just how well the game would run.

However, various outlets have been testing Monster Hunter World across several PC configurations, noting its CPU-heavy nature even with all the different graphical options. On ResetEra, Capcom USA’s vice president of digital platforms and marketing William Yagi-Bacon took to explaining why this was the case.

“To eliminate interstitial loading during active gameplay, MHW loads the entire level into memory,” he explained. “In addition to managing assets loaded into memory, it keeps track of monster interactions, health status, environment/object changes, manages LOD & objects 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.”

Previous Monster Hunter games would see players traverse through each section of a map with loading times in between. Monster Hunter World eliminates that, loading the entire world at once, while also introducing much more complex systems and environmental factors. To achieve all that at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second means an above average computer is certainly needed. Still, having played the PC version for ourselves, the scalability of the game can’t be denied.

Monster Hunter World is out on August 9th for PC.