We've benchmarked and tested every graphics setting in Monster Hunter World to understand the Frames Per Second Performance Hit. As well as identifying how demanding each graphics settings is, we've also graded how important they are when tweaking your settings. 

Using the chart below you can find out just how demanding each setting is. Along with this, we've given priority scores based on how important we believe it is to enable these graphics options.

Monster Hunter World System Requirements

For the benchmark results below we used a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, an Intel Core i7-5820K processor, and 16GB DDR4 memory.

Monster Hunter World Graphics Options Performance Breakdown

The further right the bar goes, the more demanding the graphics option is. In the case of Z-Prepass, the bar going left indicates that turning this off actually improved frame rates in Monster Hunter World.

Monster Hunter World Graphics Settings

Resolution Scaling

Confusingly, Capcom hasn't seen fit to attach a percentage to the resolution scaling option. After messing around with it though, it appears that the highest setting is relative to the users' native resolution, so should be the default. Naturally, lowering the resolution scaling will improve performance considerably as it's rendering at a lower resolution, but at a considerable cost to image quality.

Performance Impact - 5/5

Priority - 5/5

Texture Quality

Texture Resolution affects the quality of the textures in Monster Hunter World. During my testing, I wasn't actually able to discern a great difference between Low and Ultra settings, if any difference at all. It does affect the frame rate slightly, meaning it's probably not overly worth setting this to Ultra, particularly if you GPU doesn't have much VRAM.

Performance Impact - 2/5

Priority - 1/5

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion applies to the contact shadows where two objects meet. With the large, open environments and a distinct lack of hard edges outside of the hub environments, Ambient Occlusion is less noticeable in MonHun World than it is in most other titles. It's also responsible for a 10% drop in frame rate so this comes as a luxury graphics setting.

Performance Impact - 4/5

Priority - 2/5

Volume Rendering Quality

Volumetric Rendering Quality, or Volumetric Light, is typically one of the most demanding graphics options to be found in the world of PC gaming. Volumetric Lighting helps with those hazy light rays, fog and smoke effects.  In MonHun World its effect isn't actually greatly pronounced compared to normal, so be warned. Despite this it has a big impact on GPUs and could drop the framerate somewhere in the region of 20%.

Performance Impact - 5/5

Priority - 3/5

Shadow Quality

Shadow Quality does exactly what it says on the tin, affect the quality of the shadows resulting from dynamic light sources. On High, these shadows are distinct, while on Low they are murky and indistinct.

Performance Impact - 1/5

Priority - 4/5

Anti-aliasing

Monster Hunter World offers just FXAA and TXAA forms of antialiasing. The usage of each is going to come down to preference, both offering similar performance hits. Unlike some other graphical settings, AA can be tweaked in-game so just have a play around and find which of the two suits you best.

Performance Impact - 2/5

Priority - 4/5

LOD Bias

LOD Bias is used to dictate the culling of plants and foliage in the environment. The higher this setting, the more plants and vegetation are visible in Monster Hunter World when viewed from distance. This creates much denser environments to explore.

Performance Impact - 3/5

Priority - 4/5

Max LOD Level

Max LOD Level impacts the level of graphical detail on objects in the distance. The view distance in Monster Hunter World can vary greatly from area to area, but the majority actually takes place in enclosed zones that will see little benefit from this graphics setting.

Performance Impact - 3/5

Priority - 2/5

Foliage Sway

Performance Impact - 3/5

Priority - 4/5

Foliage Sway causes the plants, trees, and grass to sway realistically in the breeze. While Foliage Sway causes an undeniable hit on frame rates, it transforms Monster hunter World from a relatively static looking game to one that's filled with life. In scenes with little foliage, it has almost no impact on performance.

Subsurface Scattering

Subsurface Scattering is widely used to simulate how light penetrates a translucent surface, and we can actually see this in effect best on characters' faces during Monster Hunter World's cut-scenes. There's a softening on the shadows being cast on the faces. It's a subtle effect and his a similarly small impact on performance.

Performance Impact - 2/5

Priority - 2/5

Screen Space Reflection

Screen Space Reflections alters the appearance of objects on the surface of materials. It's fairly difficult to detect any major visual benefits to enable Screen Space Reflections, although if you've got performance to spare then it may as well be enabled for a very minor frame rate hit.

Performance Impact -  2/5

Priority - 2/5

Anisotropic Filtering

A gaming staple by now, Anisotropic Filtering affects the sharpness of textures towards the edge of screen. Textures you're looking at straight on will normally look fine, but when you look at them from an angle they can look blurred and messy. Texture Filtering, or Anisotropic Filtering, sharpens these textures up and leads to a cleaner image. In Monster Hunter World it's pretty difficult to tell the difference between Low, Medium and Ultra.

Performance Impact - 2/5

Priority - 2/5

Water Reflection

While we would normally expect Water Reflections to greatly impact the, well, reflections of things in water surfaces, changing this setting doesn't actually seem to do much in Monster Hunter World. Even on Low, the monsters are still reflected in the water's surface. Only turn this setting up if you've got performance to burn then, and image quality improvements are negligible. 

Performance Impact - 2/5

Priority - 2/5

SH Diffuse Quality

One of the heaviest performance hits to be found in Monster Hunter World, SH Diffuse Quality should, in theory, be related to the quality of transparency fades and non-light source lights bouncing off surfaces. In practice though, it's a lot of dropped frames for almost zero increase in image quality. If you're struggling for frames, set SH Diffuse to Low immediately.

Performance Impact - 4/5 

Priority - 1/5

Dynamic Range

This particular graphics setting is basically only worth utilising for HDR monitor owners. On a standard SDR monitor, the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit is imperceptible. If you've got an HDR monitor though, it's going to be worth enabling this setting as it offers no performance hit.

Performance Impact - 0/5

Priority - 5/5

Z-Prepass

Z-Prepass is actually a new one for us. We've yet to see this graphics setting in any game ever, and we're still none the wiser as to what it does even now. Disabling it actually improved our frame rates by close to 5%, which isn't insignificant. Curiously, Capcom does recommend that low-spec PCs disable Z-Prepass for improved performance in Monster Hunter World. Quite why you'd want it on though, we don't know.

Performance Impact - 0/5

Priority - 0/5