All kudos go to these amazing people who did more for improving performance than Capcom themselves have not in 9 whole friggin months:
Eigeen[next.nexusmods.com], AsteriskAmpersand[next.nexusmods.com] and praydog[next.nexusmods.com]

I am just representing their work, cause nobody else neither did on here nor anywhere else in videoform AFAIK. And I do think more people have to be aware of this, since it's the most improvement we have gotten since launch. I'm dead serious.

• REFramework nightly (as of October 2025)[github.com]
  
• MHW-tex-decompressor[github.com]
  
• more diskspace
  
• a brain / ability to read

So, I've been trying to enjoy this game for 248 days now. (yes, I do count them) So far quite unsucessfully but what I am about to show you is the only thing that actually does make a noticeable difference in performance and it is quite easy to achieve actually.

To get it out of the way immediately:
That doesn’t mean it suddenly runs great or that I can enjoy it now personally - it still performs like absolute dog poop - but hey, it’s a start.
And who knows? TU4 is just around the corner and will surely bring all those promised performance improvements[www.monsterhunter.com]… right? RIGHT? 😉No it won't, don't be ridiculous.
Now I am talking to myself on a Steam "describe your guide" Textbox. Jesus what has this mess of a game done to me.

And please, if you're one of those huh, what is this dude on about? It just runs fine for me. You can't expect the game to run on an turing / ampere card - just spare me your bs and leave. I simply can't throw any more money at my rig cause there is nothing to upgrade anymore, I know what I am talking about. And I don't even want to think about the amount of hours I spent on tinkering with this disastrous unfinished crap game. Excuse the language, but I am really tired of people not spitting it out what this game really is and on top even defend it, as if that multi-billion dollar company would be their little brother or something.

One of the biggest causes of absolutely dreadful performance in Monster Hunter Wilds, especially those nasty frametime spikes, comes down to compressed textures.
Because all textures are shipped in a compressed format, your GPU has to decompress them on the fly while also rendering the game world. That means it’s doing double the work — just so it can show us the same looking uggl… uh, I mean, breathtakingly gorgeous desert textures on our screens.

Luckily, some clever folks out there figured out a way to decompress these textures ahead of time, which takes a huge load off the GPU and frees up resources for what really matters in a video game: actually rendering the world. Downside of it being you need 50-80GB more disk space, but it's totally worth it. On a RTX 3070 high res textures went from literally unplayable to somewhat smooth and on a 5090 VRAM usage gets cut by 33%. I wish I was joking.

See for yourself. https://youtu.be/rg2hBvqZFe4?si=nWqjjfMbyXaVGKY0

• Download REFramework [github.com] (MHWILDS.zip), extract the ZIP file, and place dinput8.dll into your Monster Hunter Wilds game folder (default path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\MonsterHunterWilds).
  
• Start MH:Wilds. The REFramework window should appear in the top-left corner. If it doesn’t, press the Insert key (above your arrow keys) to open it. Then expand LooseFileLoader and check its box to activate it. It should look like this:
  https://images.steamusercontent.com/ugc/13145172493641803049/1ED0787F5489BC22CA8EEA2031904AE8F0DB13EA/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false
  
• press ins key once more, so reframework window closes (otherwise that activated checkbox won't save)
  
• Close the game.
  
• Run mhws-tex-decompressor.exe.
  
• Choose Automatic and follow the on-screen steps — it’s pretty self-explanatory.
  
• Start the game again.

Do I have to keep backup files when using automatic mode on mhw-tex-decompressor?

Well, it depends. If you're fine with re-downloading the game entirely in case of anything breaking, then no, absolutely no reason to keep them.
If you have, let's say a metered connection, like a monthly traffic limit set by your ISP or a real slow connection, then I guess you're better off with keeping them, biting the dust and accept those extra gigabytes on your drive. Anyway, your gameinstallation filesize will increase no matter what.
Example of two of the biggest files decompressed:
21.3GB -> 35.3GB (regular textures)
70.9GB -> 120GB (high res texture pack)

So if you keep the backup, the actual folder size will be 315GB if you decompress literally everything and keep the backup created by mhw-tex-decompressor (they'll all be renamed to .backup as file extension in your folder).

Am I safe to update my game with this modification?

Nope. Steam will break your game when the next (bigger) update drops, since it will automatically realize your files are not original, therefore it will delete them and start re-downloading all of them without asking for confirmation. Hence I'd suggest putting auto update for MH:W on manually and keep original compressed files, so you can restore them quickly with mhw-tex-decompressor first and only then let steam update your game. This way you're 100% safe.

Can you really use high res textures on a 8GB VRAM GPU with this?

In my few parkours I have not noticed any blurry textures, so you should be fine and on my test high res texture simply were unplayable when compressed on a RTX 3070. But I also do have to be honest and tell you that I have not tested that scenario enough to really confirm that it is possible. The thing is MH:W will reduce texture quality based of VRAM usage and can make some textures blurry any moment, so meaning you can't really "test" this anyway. You just have to play the game normally and you'll have your answer over time. If you're that paranoid of the game making textures blurry automatically at times, just reduce texture quality to high. All textures are compressed, so in theory it should bring improvement on all texture quality levels not high res texture exclusively.

Once again: I don't take credit for any of this, and never wanted to. I just wanted to get this out here since I only saw BS guides which either destroy all visuals entirely, or just don't improve anything at all.