The anticipated PC port of previous PlayStation exclusive title Horizon Forbidden West was released on Thursday. As with most other Sony conversions, Dutch studio Nixxes took care of this, and according to Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry’s technical department, the developers have again done a very good job.
The game has a detailed menu where you can change graphics settings on the fly and see how it affects the quality. In terms of anti-aliasing, it is also above the standard, since in addition to TAA it offers the SMAA header or the ability to completely disable AA, which, of course, is not recommended. There are also several upscalers: DLSS, FSR (can also be used in native mode) and XeSS. Another nice feature is, for example, support for widescreen monitors.
After Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the PC version of HFW is the next game to use DirectStorage technology for faster loading times, although this time without stripping the GPU. The results are very good in any case, saving to a fast NVMe SSD loads in about 6 seconds, almost a second faster than on the PS5. But since decompression is done through the processor, the time will also depend on the performance of your processor.
Luckily, you don’t have to worry about the annoying stuttering that plagues many games. The game precompiles most of the shaders when first launched. Some of this only compiles at runtime on currently unused CPU threads, but everything handles well and you shouldn’t encounter any stutters.
There’s nothing revolutionary going on in terms of improvements over the PS5 version. On PC, you can improve anisotropic filtering or increase the level of detail, but in most cases these are only minor improvements. The main thing is the potential increase in image quality, especially compared to the PS5’s Performance mode, both at high native resolution and when upscaled. By the way, this can be combined with dynamic internal resolution, which provides maximum image quality at a stable frame rate.
From a performance standpoint, the game mostly behaves as stated in the HW requirements. Battaglia also tested VRAM, specifically graphics cards with 8GB of memory, which is a real problem in some games today. Here you can play with them in Full HD or 1440p without any problems, but in 1800p, for example, data from VRAM can overflow into system memory, which causes an unpleasant drop in frame rate or stuttering.
Battaglia tested CPU performance on a 2019 Ryzen 5 3600, which is capable of running the game at over 60 frames per second. In larger fights, the frame rate can even drop below 60, but on the one hand these are rather exceptions, and above all, compared to other games, the CPU limitation does not cause any stuttering or unstable time between frames. Everything still feels very smooth.
The port turned out to be not entirely error-free. At the beginning of the game, Battaglia encountered several minor glitches, the first cutscene does not play at a stable frame rate and, for example, there is no support for frame generation using FSR 3 (DLSS 3 Frame Gen is in the game). However, Nixxes is already working on fixes, and FSR 3 should also appear in the game sooner or later. Overall, this is an exceptionally good PC port among a sea of games that have serious issues on the platform.
Watch the video for details, but playing a PC game on low end hardware like Ryzen 5 3600/RTX 2070 Super without major frame time issues all over is VERY AMAZING. If you’re looking for a well-running and beautiful RPG for PC right now, this is it!
— Alexander Battaglia (@Dachsjaeger) March 20, 2024
Source :Indian TV
