That Wild Hearts performance patch didn’t actually fix much, huh

A lot of folks, including our Liam, have been having a grand old time hunting Japanese fantasy beasts in Wild Hearts. Great! Less great is that it still runs like concrete on PC, even after a performance-focused patch that developers Omega Force had detailed even before the game had formally released.

Released earlier this week, the update claims to fix the now-infamous CPU bottlenecking issue (which was severely limiting graphics card performance), as well as more peculiar problems with sound output settings and flashing lights when played on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. I’ve been testing the patch in support of our best settings guide, and while I haven’t personally encountered the latter two hiccups, it does look as if CPU bottlenecking has survived – with overall performance well below reasonable expectations.

There has been a very, very slight uplift. Before the patch my test rig, comprised of an RTX 3070 and Core i5-11600K and running at 1440p, averaged 59fps on the Highest preset and 73fps on Lowest. After the patch, those crept up to 61fps and 78fps respectively. Lowering or disabling certain individual settings, like motion blur and depth of field, also now yield juicier performance gains.

But these are teeny, tiny steps forward for a game that, frankly, does not look good enough to be taxing an RTX 3070 system this hard. CPU bottlenecking remains a pain in the bottleneck, with the Lowest preset running at just 80fps at 1080p – just 2fps faster than it did at the much tougher 1440p. And this patch has done nothing to smooth out the heavy stuttering that Wild Hearts has been suffering rom since its early trial period.

DLSS and FSR are coming in another, future patch, and these might help out if you’re getting lower than expected framerates on your PC. But then their effectiveness will be badly limited if this bottlenecking issue isn’t fixed – properly fixed – beforehand. Fingers, toes, blades etc. crossed.