How-TO Wild Hearts: The Best Settings to Use on PC

Kaiju-quashing RPG Wild Hearts is out today, and it has some technical issues that make playing the PC version quite a challenge. This guide is based on the game’s early trial build, and it will help you optimize your settings until the developers release the promised performance improvements. With this guide, you can join the hunt pronto and make your gameplay as enjoyable as possible.

What game settings affect FPS the most? Wild Hearts is bottlenecked, which means that no matter how powerful your graphics card is, it won't be able to surpass a certain framerate. The game settings that affect FPS the most are the following:

• Upscaling: The temporal upscaler that the game includes is terrible. Enabling it at native 1440p makes the game look sub-1080p, and only improves Highest preset performance to 68fps.
• Procedural density: Lowering this setting will rob a lot of open areas of details like foliage.
• Global illumination: Lowering this setting can improve your average FPS by two frames per second.

How do I optimize my graphics settings? If you have an RTX 3070 at 1440p, Wild Hearts averages 59fps on the Highest graphics preset, 63fps on Standard, 65fps on Low, and 73fps on Lowest. Although the difference between the highest and lowest presets is relatively small, you should avoid using the lowest preset as it looks awful. To optimize your graphics settings, follow the guide below:

• Textures: You may leave this setting maxed out as dropping it from High to Low left average performance unchanged, still at 59fps.
• Model quality: Lowering this setting from High to Low produced a 61fps average.
• Texture filtering: Lowering this setting to Low produced another 61fps result with minimal visible quality impact.
• Particle effects: You may leave this setting up as Low averages the same 59fps as High.
• Shadows: Lowering this setting from High to Low produced another 1fps gain.
• Reflections: You may set this setting to Low as reflective surfaces aren’t especially common. Although this only got an extra 1fps out of the RTX 3070, you may find it useful.
• Clouds: You can leave this setting on High as the Low setting somehow dropped performance to 58fps, strangely enough.
• Anti-aliasing: You have three options here: TAA, FXAA, and Off. TAA’s tendency to blur textures isn’t ideal, but it’s the best of the lot until DLSS and its built-in AA is added.
• Motion blur: Turn this setting off as its excessive smearing is an affront to the eyes.

If you follow these settings, you can smooth out your performance a little bit, but keep in mind that these may need updating once the bottlenecking fix arrives next week. If you can't wait to start sticking katanas into giant rats, then these settings will give you a decent experience.