With the announcement that more PlayStation-exclusive PCs are launching, with Days Gone this spring, it felt like time to return to Horizon Zero Dawn, Sony’s first full-blooded attempt to release one of its most celebrated triple-A masterpieces to wear. With the release, the performance and overall quality of the user experience was poor, but six months later there is no doubt: the game has improved dramatically. It’s not perfect, it’s far from ideal, but Guerrilla Games has taken feedback on board and fixed many of the issues, while performance has improved dramatically in some scenarios.
Even just to upload the game, there are differences that appear immediately. When the game was first released, Horizon actually displayed internally with the right resolution, before the title started with 4K resolution, before being scaled down to 1080p, and then scaled up to 2160p – that’s right now. The initial shade composition that took so long back in the day is now running in the background so you can visit the settings screen while it’s running or even start the game (I would recommend completing the shade process ). The menus themselves remain very much the same, but the different v-sync options now also work properly, without the enormous performance that windowless mode had when the game was launched. Anisotropic filter? It was also broken at release, which requires an adjustment of the GPU control panel to improve detail, but it now works as it should.
Alex Battaglia presents the current state of affairs on the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn.
These are basic things, but it’s good to see. The same goes for the scale of dynamic resolutions: during the launch of 4K ultra on an RTX 2080 Ti, a targeted scene can work at 54 fps, so DRS just needs to adjust the resolution down to get us at 60 fps – but in instead, the resolution dropped to 1080p instead (!). You guessed it, it has now been fixed, and I would recommend DRS to be activated if you are running at a fixed frame rate such as 60 fps. AMD’s FidelityFX contrast adaptive sharpening (CAS) is also added to the menu system: it’s just a sharpening filter, but I think it’s a good improvement for those who want to increase contrast when using at a lower resolution and TAA anti-aliasing use.
Before we move on to the more in-depth issues we’ve had with the release code, there’s one issue I would like to address. Surrounding Occupancy of the Screen Space (SSAO) was apparently flawless during launch as the radius of the shadow effect decreased at higher resolutions with the higher quality settings. It’s still the same with the latest patch 1.10, so while it may sound strange, I would still recommend the medium setting here. I would also recommend the medium setting for texture quality. Like the launch version, it seems that using a higher setting only adjusts LOD bias – it can produces more detail in the distance, but there is a danger that if you take in too many texture details too few pixels, you will get an unwelcome glittering aliasing effect.
In the game, almost all the problems we had were solved, or at least mitigations were made. With the launch, the grass animation added to the computer version only ran at 30fps when the rest of the game was unlocked – this has now been fixed. Other 30fps-related issues – such as Aloy’s hair animation – are also resolved. Another issue with the frame rate was general discomfort in the tracks at 60fps, as the game apparently was designed to have a fixed 30fps update. Characters in different positions on camera clips seem to be crooked: this is not happening anymore. However, there is now a new effect – one we see on quite a few games – a freezing effect on characters during transitions as the rest of the world continues to update. It’s not a big deal, but it’s there and it’s remarkable. However, this is an improvement over the previous curve effect.
Our original report on the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn – it was fundamentally a serious disappointment, but major improvements were made during the month.
As far as gameplay issues are concerned, the worst problem – stuttering on camera clips, during cross-country or even when UI elements are presented – has improved, but is still not quite right. The stutter has now been reduced, but there still seems to be a problem where the UI appears with a new message: it is no longer a frame-time stutter, but more a leap in motion. I noticed this a few times during my play and it’s noticeable, but it’s less distracting than the fleeting freezing point seen in the release code. The experience is definitely improved, but there are still oddities – like a thin black outline that sometimes frames the whole presentation.
Besides polish and stability, performance during the day was a real problem. Nvidia GPUs based on the 10-series Pascal architecture suffered particularly, to the point where the GTX 1060 outperformed the far less capable PlayStation 4 GPU. Its closest AMD equivalent – the Radeon RX 580 – performed better, but more than 6TF computing power could not consistently double the performance of the 1.84TF PS4 graphics core. There is good news and bad news here. Whether it’s due to the optimization of Guerrilla Games, Nvidia driver enhancements or a mixture of both, the GTX 1060 is now much, much more effective. The improvement is huge: the benchmark is a 65 percent increase in performance, while stuttering is currently being reduced to a large extent.
The RX 580 sees less exciting differences. In terms of benchmark, the overall performance is the same, but the first cut in the game points much more in the direction of interesting improvements, while the overall frame rate is higher, while overall optimizations we’ve already talked about have a much lowered level of stuttering. That being said, it’s worth pointing out that moving further into the game, the performance equals how the game looked after the launch running on this GPU, while GTX 1060 still showed a huge improvement has. Indeed, if we put the two ‘old timer’ GPUs in a row, they are now very similar in a world where games usually favor one over the other. This is quite interesting as I would expect AMD’s GCN architecture to show an advantage in a console-centric title.
Days running on PS5 improve the game dramatically – a hint as to what the upcoming PC port might deliver?
So, what have we learned from this re-evaluation of the game and are there takeaways on how future Sony ports might work out? Clearly, we do not really want to see this situation play out on future Sony titles. Well, Horizon Zero Dawn has been greatly improved and it’s no longer a ‘bad’ computer conversion, but it’s not particularly outstanding either: there are still some issues, such as the awkward camera change animation that standing still, the rather odd animated playback push and the fact that I still think the game generally does not perform well on a computer compared to the consoles. Even with similar console settings with low quality and average image quality anisotropic filter at 1080p, we should expect GPUs like RX 580 and GTX 1060 to be much more than the results of PlayStation 4. If we take the RX 580 as an example, you see an AMD GPU with more than three times the performance of PlayStation 4 less than 60 fps is disappointing – and does not match the performance upgrade seen on other rounded console ports.
But again, Horizon Zero Dawn was never intended for a multi-platform launch and works on an engine not designed to be only on PS4 – nor was it intended to run at anything other than 30 fps to run. And this is where Sony’s other first party titles can see a graceful transition to a PC. Take, for example, Days Gone – the next Sony conversion to appear sometime in the spring. It uses Unreal Engine 4 as a base to help switch between platforms, while we’ve already seen with the PlayStation 5 patch that removing the 30 fps cap can make the game run just as well at 60 fps – and possibly further. We’ve seen similarly improved performances with Ghost of Tsushima, God of War and even the OG version of The Last Guardian. Get PC ports right it’s not easy, but there is evidence to suggest that arbitrary frame rates may be at least less problematic for some Sony first party titles. How far Sony pushes these gates – and how much improvement we’ll see over the original PlayStation games – remains to be seen, but we’ll look at each one when and when they arrive.