Is there a PC gaming experience more universal than poking at graphics settings one at a time, dropping anisotropic filtering and rendering distance from high, to medium, to low, in the forlorn hope of seeing the framerate counter inch over the 60 fps line?
I found myself in that familiar spot this afternoon when Capcom released the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark on Steam. It promises to offer a sense of how well the game will run on our PCs at launch, and made me face the harsh reality that my RTX 3070 isn't going to let me keep nearly as many of those settings on «high» as I'd like.
Painful choices lie ahead. I'll admit I'm hoping for a lot from a four-year-old graphics card that has only 8GB of VRAM (which was stingy then, and feels particularly stingy now!); I use a 1440p monitor, and that resolution isn't compatible with running many cutting edge games at 60 fps without some settings dropped right down to the floor.
Enter DLSS, hopefully my saviour. On Wilds' default high settings with DLSS set to Balanced, I got a respectable 54.43 fps average; sounds good on the surface, but that average number is close to meaningless for a benchmark that runs as long as this one does.
Some scenes in the benchmark are significantly less demanding, sending the framerate up into the 70s and 80s; but when the weather effects and complex monster animations start popping off in large, detailed environments, it drops a whole lot lower than 54 frames per second.