When Guerrilla Games announced that its PS4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn was coming to PC, gamers were elated at the potential of higher performance and better visuals. Unfortunately, the games’ launch on PC, 3 years after debuting on Sony’s console, was, to say the least, messy. However, Guerrilla has been fixing the game since its release, and the current version (v1.10) finally seems to have fixed all of the launch problems. Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia took a deep dive into the PC version with an RTX 2080 Ti and found most of the issues to have finally been resolved.
When the game came out on PC at launch, it stunned many PC gamers with its poor optimisation. It wasn’t particularly surprising since console to PC ports have had a tendency to be messy. However, this felt like a special case after a really good PC port of Death Stranding, which uses the same Decima engine that Guerrilla used in HZD. In our own PC port review at launch, we concluded with the following to say about the port:
“It’s a little disappointing to see HZD, which was one of PS4’s (and this generation’s) best-looking games to come in such a state on PC. While you can put the game on Ultra and call it a day, you won’t get good performance out of it right now.” – Horizon Zero Dawn PC Port Analysis (TechQuila).
Digital Foundry has tested the game again with the following being the major findings regarding fixes:
- Dynamic Resolution Scaling has been fixed.
- Anisotropic Filtering
- Addition of AMD FidelityFX CAS
- Grass animation now renders at 60 FPS
- Character warping on camera cuts fixed.
It’s not all good news though, as certain problems still persists such as occasional stuttering during world traversal. We recommend watching the video above to get a better, more in-depth understanding of the fixes.
While it’s nice to see HZD working better on PC, we hope that future PS4-to-PC ports (like Days Gone) don’t come with the same problems. At the very least, these ports will require the same system requirements across the board. Sony has previously mentioned their interest in bringing more PS4 exclusives to PC in the future, and a smooth transition to the PC space will be a win-win situation for all gamers alike.