Digital Foundry Report on Horizon Zero Dawn PC
Digital Foundry decided to see how Horizon Zero Dawn fares on PC after the many patches that have come out since the game's release in August 2020.
- Digital Foundry checked how Horizon Zero Dawn fares on PC six months after the release;
- The conclusions are positive, so if you have been putting off the purchase, now is a good time to reconsider.
OsHorizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition on PC worth your attention half a year after release? Digital Foundry checked out the game's technical condition after months that went into patching Sony's first PS4 exclusive port for PC. The conclusions are positive, although the game is still a little short of perfection.
When Horizon Zero Dawn launched on PC it was riddled with bugs and had a huge problem with optimization, which meant that even the most powerful PCs could not offer smooth gameplay at higher resolutions. Subsequent updates were released on a fairly regular basis, improving various aspects of gameplay, issues, and optimization.
One of the first patches improved, among other things, resolution scaling. When we set it to 4K, for example, Horizon downsampled it to 1080p and then upscaled it back to 4K, which resulted in a blurry image. Shader processing has been significantly optimized, which in the release version compiled every time we launched the game and took several minutes. The operation of visual options - vertical synchronization and anisotropic filtering - has also been improved.
A lot of work was also put into improving the game's performance at 60 fps. On the day of release, the game's vegetation and Aloy's hair were not adjusted to such high fluidity and were refreshed at 30 fps. The same was true of cutscenes, which looked pretty weird at 60fps. Fortunately, all of this is now a thing of the past, as are the micro-cuts with virtually every camera movement.
Optimisation on weaker hardware has also improved significantly. During testing, Digital Foundry indicated that average fps improved by as much as 20 fps on GeForce GTX 1060, with AMD Radeon RX 580 tested showing much smaller gains, amounting to a few frames per second at most.
Of course, it's not perfect and the title still has issues with SSAO on higher quality settings. Perhaps the team responsible for porting the game to PC will return to the issue and fix this aspect in the next update. However, as communicated recently - Guerrilla Games is focusing on Horizon Forbidden West, which will be coming to PS4 and PS5.
