Monster Hunter Wilds brings hope with newly lowered PC requirements, then dashes it with a benchmark tool

rockpapershotgun.com:

True to the word of Capcom’s German social media marketing, Monster Hunter Wilds has a new, generally less extravagant set of PC system requirements ahead of its February 28th launch. There’s also a standalone benchmark tool that you can download from the game’s Steam page, so you can see for yourself how the beast-biffing RPG will run on your hardware.

In theory, these are great developments. Lower requirements mean a more widely accessible game, and the benchmark tool – which covers a good six minutes of combined cinematics and simulated free roaming – brings reassurance and accountability to this otherwise hype-reliant prerelease period. Sadly, there are two problems. One, the benchmark confirms outright that Monster Hunter Wilds will run like stagnant goulash on low-end PCs, and two, it does so to the extent that I’m not sure that the revised minimum specs are even reliable.

Besides the remarkable drop from 140GB to 75GB of required SSD space - Dr. Weird would approve - the new min specs typically tone down their CPU and graphics card asks by one step. The minimum Nvidia GPU, for example, has dropped from the GTX 1660 Super to the standard GTX 1660, and you can supposedly get away with an Intel Core i5-10400 rather than the previously listed Core i5-10600. Cool! Except the stipulation remains that these will only manage 1080p when employing both upscaling and frame generation, which Wilds supports in Nvidia DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 3.1 varieties.

This isn’t how frame generation is supposed to be used, at all. Because it requires a high 'base' of ordinarily rendered frames to both insert interpolated frames and to offset its added input lag, frame gen's real use is to take games that already run well and make them look properly, bleeding-edge silky. Relying on it to artificially push a PC-melter past 30fps is daft because it will still tangibly feel, from the lack of input responsiveness, like it’s running at 20fps or 15fps or whatever. Which, in terms of 'real'