Modern PC gaming has become increasingly demanding compared to games from 5-10 years ago. We saw this with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which not only had GPU hardware ray tracing as a minimum requirement but also restricted full ray tracing (path tracing) to Nvidia GPUs only; not even AMD’s flagship 7900 XTX could use it. Doom: The Dark Ages also introduced ray tracing as a requirement. In other words, your old Nvidia GTX GPU simply isn't good enough anymore.

Now, it seems some RTX owners are also being pushed into the same category as older GTX GPUs. Benchmarks from the upcoming RPG Monster Hunter Wilds show the RTX 3060 struggling to maintain a consistent 60 FPS at 1080p. Although the game doesn't release until February 28th, Capcom has provided a free benchmark PC tool that lets you test how well MHW will run on your system before making the final purchase. And spoiler alert – it's not looking good for mid-range PC gamers.

The RTX 3060 is not good enough for native 1080p, DLSS is a must

Daniel Owen, a tech enthusiast on YouTube, shared a performance analysis of Monster Hunter Wilds on an RTX 3060 paired with a Ryzen 5 5600X. The test was done on three different settings: one based on the game's automatic suggestion (medium settings with DLSS set to performance), medium settings without any upscaling, and Ultra settings without any upscaling. Things don’t look great as the system struggled to maintain a consistent 60 FPS in intensive gameplay scenes across all three tests.

At medium settings with DLSS performance enabled, the RTX 3060 averaged 61 FPS. However, there were several instances where the FPS dropped below 40, especially in gameplay sections. Additionally, during cutscenes, there were significant FPS spikes. This was the result at medium settings with an internal resolution of 540p, upscaled to 1080p. For the medium settings with 1080p native resolution, the GPU scored an average FPS of 48, with demanding areas barely pushing the GPU above the 30 FPS mark. With Ultra settings and DLSS disabled, the performance was predictably poor, with heavy fluctuations during cutscenes and gameplay dropping to 28 FPS at times.

That said, the GPU wasn’t the only component put under stress. The CPU was also tested in town areas with a large number of NPCs. In these situations, you could see the GPU being bottlenecked by the CPU, causing the FPS to dip below the 40 range.

The RTX 3060 has long been the most popular GPU on Steam and has even continued to be a best-seller in 2025. While this card will eventually make way for newer generations, it still holds the top spot according to the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey (January 2025), accounting for 5.06% of all users on Steam.

The state of modern gaming

As you can see from the benchmarks, the game is not only heavily GPU-intensive but also CPU-intensive. Even an RTX 3060, which isn’t as old as this game makes it to be, can only deliver a “playable experience” on medium settings. This means that the gameplay you’re getting with this popular card isn’t great, with graphic quality which we’d say is lackluster by many people’s standards.

This raises the question: are developers expecting gamers to upgrade to the latest hardware every year? Or is this just poor optimization for a broad range of hardware? If you ask me, it’s more likely the latter. Recently, we’ve seen games that are optimized well, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 being a prime example, as the game even runs on a handheld like the Steam Deck.

MWH, on the other hand, is just not one of those games. We’ve recently tested the game, benchmarking the game with an RTX 5080, and even that doesn’t provide the smoothest 4K experience you’ll ever see without help from DLSS – frame generation in particular. For example, the game averaged between 55-58 FPS maxed out at 4K native resolution (no frame gen).

About the Author

Hassam Nasir

Hassam boasts over seven years of professional experience as a dedicated PC hardware reviewer and writer.