Monster Hunter Wilds: the August 14 patch fixes framerate drops — and one AMD driver is explicitly to avoid

Capcom is rolling out version 1.042.00.02 of Monster Hunter Wilds this Friday, August 14, and its sole purpose is this: "measures are being taken to fix an issue causing frame rate drops on certain configurations following the release of version 1.042.00.01".

In other words, it's a fix for a fix. And if you found the game running worse over the past week without understanding why, you weren't imagining things: it was the August 7 patch that introduced the regression.

This update is also an opportunity to lay out a point Capcom has repeated in every one of its announcements since the start of the month, and that almost no one follows: the publisher publishes a precise list of graphics driver versions, and explicitly advises against one.

The three August versions, in order

To make sense of it all, here's the full sequence:

• Ver. 1.042.00.00 — announced on August 3, available on August 4. This is the month's major content update, released the same day the game moved to a new price point.
• Ver. 1.042.00.01 — announced on August 8, available on August 7 (alongside demo version 1.0.1). Fixes an issue preventing the Options → Graphics → Render Scale setting from being applied. This is the version that introduced the performance regression.
• Ver. 1.042.00.02 — announced and available on Friday, August 14. Fixes the frame rate drops caused by the previous version.

A reminder that applies to all three: you must install the latest version to play online multiplayer and access downloadable content. This isn't a recommendation, it's a lock. If your friends can no longer see you online today, the update is the first thing to check.

The drivers recommended by Capcom

The publisher gives a floor, not an exact version:

• NVIDIA GeForce: 581.57 or newer
• AMD Radeon: 25.9.1 or newer

And it immediately adds the warning that matters: "certain issues have been identified with AMD Radeon driver versions 25.10.2 and newer".

It's worth grasping what this actually means, because it's counterintuitive and it's the main source of confusion: Capcom is asking you both to be on at least 25.9.1 and to avoid versions from 25.10.2 onward. The recommended window for an AMD card is therefore narrow, and above all, updating your driver can make things worse. That's the opposite of the usual instinct.

On an AMD card, if you're experiencing performance drops and you're on a recent driver, the useful move isn't to look for an even newer version: it's to roll back to a version prior to 25.10.2.

A caveat Capcom raises itself

The notice ends with a line that shouldn't be skimmed over: "this information is subject to change at any time depending on certain factors, such as the availability of support provided by NVIDIA and AMD".

Translation: these version numbers aren't set in stone. They reflect the state of compatibility as of August 14. A future AMD driver could perfectly well fix the issue identified in 25.10.2 — and if that happens, the recommendation will change. That's also why it's better to reread the update announcement with each patch rather than apply a fixed configuration once and for all.

The diagnostic method, in order

If your game is stuttering after today's update, proceed as follows rather than changing ten settings at once:

1. Check that 1.042.00.02 is actually installed. On Steam, force verification by restarting the client. The patch came out this morning: if you launched the game early, you might still be on 1.042.00.01, which is precisely the faulty version.
2. Check your driver version. NVIDIA Control Panel or Adrenalin software on the AMD side. Compare against the two minimums above, and above all make sure you're not on 25.10.2 or later on Radeon.
3. Reopen the Render Scale setting. 1.042.00.01 had broken its application; the setting may have remained in an inconsistent state. Set it to a value, confirm, exit the menu, come back in: this is the setting with the biggest impact on this game's performance.
4. Only touch the rest afterward. Ray tracing, textures, shadow quality: all of that gets adjusted once the base is solid. Many players lower their textures to compensate for a driver issue, which fixes nothing and degrades the image for no reason.

The often-forgotten case of the demo

The Monster Hunter Wilds Prologue Demo has been available since August 5. It requires at least 26 GB of storage space and covers everything from character creation to Chapter 1-3: Toward the Forest. Online features and Photo Mode are not available in it.

An important point if you're testing your machine's setup with it: the demo has its own version numbering — 1.0.1 was released at the same time as patch 1.042.00.01 for the full game. Don't assume that a fix for the main game automatically applies to the demo, or vice versa. If you're comparing performance between the two, compare up-to-date versions on both sides.

What this series of patches says about the schedule

Three versions in eleven days, two of them purely corrective, looks like nervous maintenance. The context explains it: 1.042.00.00 on August 4 arrived at the same time as a price change for the game and the launch of a demo. In other words, a wave of new players arriving, on a much more varied pool of machines than the usual base. Compatibility issues always crop up at that point.

As for the rest, the known schedule is short: a collaboration with Fender on August 26, and Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance, the expansion, announced for 2027. Nothing indicates a new major content update before then — which suggests that upcoming releases will, like today's, be stability patches.