Read from digitalfoundry:
It's still a unique experience for PC users, simply because multi-platform projects and even the odd PC exclusive aren't built quite like this. Horizon Zero Dawn looks and feels a class apart in many ways - and yes, you can increase graphics settings and improve resolutions and frame-rate compared to the PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro originals. However, where the game falls short is in its many technical failings.
When a game is content-complete but requires polish and bug-testing, it's considered beta code - and that's the impression we got from this conversion when we tested it, to the point where much of the reviewing process has been a case of testing and re-testing the game on multiple pieces of hardware to answer a simple question - is there something wrong with our kit or is the game at fault? It's a little bit of one and a lot of the other, but the bottom line is that there are many technical issues that need addressing to the point where not all of them can be included in this article. A 35GB day one patch arrived on the same day as the embargo lift - hence the delay in publishing our review - but the many and varied problems are still in effect in the code that makes its way to players.
It starts with the initial 'optimisation' phase on boot. Like a number of DX12 and Vulkan titles, shaders are compiled and stored the first time you play the game - as opposed to generating them during play, potentially inducing stutter. It's an extended process to say the least, it adds to the storage footprint, and if your drive fills up during this procedure, the game crashes to desktop - sometimes with an ominous 'fatal error'. While testing and re-testing across systems, the process could often stall and lock-up even when required storage was available. Beyond that, when I booted the game on my 4K screen in full-screen mode, something didn't look right. It turned out that Horizon was rendering at 4K, downscaling to 1080p, then upscaling to 4K again. Switching to the borderless display option fixes this (albeit introducing other issues), as does swapping back to full-screen mode from borderless. Bizarre.
So, for example, the reflections setting improves the quality of screen-space reflections - and the high preset is indeed of a higher quality than console-standard medium. However, the practical difference is minimal and the main disadvantages of SSR are not mitigated. A game based mostly in nature has very little in the way of reflective surfaces meaning that where there is a gain, it's not really significant. Similarly, the only real difference in shadow quality at the highest setting comes in the first cascade right in front of Aloy. It helps a touch with self-shadowing but not to any great degree. It doesn't change the range of shadow cascades or the distances at which they 'pop'. Even the texture setting is a little strange. Pushing the setting up increases texture quality further into the distance. There's the perception of increased detail, but it can also produce aliasing issues - leaving it on console quality medium is just fine. Speaking of texture quality, the anisotropic filtering setting simply does not work. My advice? Set it manually to 16x in your GPU control panel for an actual quality boost.
Various anti-aliasing options are available but of all of them, only TAA really does a good job - and thankfully it has a minimal performance hit. Two settings I do recommend boosting from console quality are model detail and volumetric clouds. The former increases the distance at which certain patches of grass or objects render further away from Aloy, reducing the pop-in effect - and it also increases the distance at which the higher quality versions of a model are rendered. So trees into the distance will look less cardboard and '2D-like' and show off more individual branches and leaves. Guerrilla's cloud rendering system is brilliant but computationally expensive.
If you were looking to utilise the game's dynamic resolution scaling for balancing performance, I do not recommend it at all, as it is overzealous to the extreme and coarse in its application. I observed a scene rendering at 55fps using native 4K at ultra settings on an RTX 2080 Ti, where DRS should deliver full frame-rate with a minimal resolution drop. Engaging dynamic resolution scaling did indeed get me to 60fps but pixel-counting saw that the game had switched resolution to 1080p to get the job done. To claw back a mere 5fps, the game had quartered resolution to do it. I'd recommend leaving DRS disabled.
Stutters in excess of 40ms, 70ms or over 100ms can happen as a cutscenes starts or ends, when a camera changes position in a cutscene, when a UI element updates for a quest, or when you are just walking around in the world not doing anything special in particular. This happens reproducibly across multiple graphics card and CPUs and chosen resolutions, impacting the fluidity of the game, producing an experience less consistent overall that the PlayStation 4 version, which has no such stutter.
I thought that dropping to console-level 30fps might solve the issue but the problem is that the 30fps cap within the game actually runs at 29fps, producing even more stutter. Also, if you are experiencing profound performance problems, make sure you have your mainboard properly configured for 16x PCIe bandwidth for the GPU. This one's on me but I didn't - my slot was set to 8x bandwidth and it hobbled performance, while switching up to 16x solve that particular problem. Going back to Death Stranding, PCIe bandwidth made no difference at all.
There are other issues that need to be addressed. Cutscenes run at arbitrary frame-rates but facial animation is locked to 30 frames per second - it doesn't look right, with an almost Wallace and Gromit-like effect. Another problem in cutscenes is how they were not authored around the idea of interpolated frame-rates above 30fps, so in some cutscenes you can see characters warp around during scene cuts. Mismatches in animation refresh are evident elsewhere: Horizon's tall 'stealth grass' runs at the correct frame-rate at all times, but the new dynamic plants and foliage added to the PC version are locked at 30 frames per second refresh instead. An unlocked frame-rate needs to mean just that - picking and choosing what can meet the limits of PC hardware and what remains locked to 30Hz shouldn't be an option. What's so baffling about this is that Guerrilla Games are perfectionists - I can't help but feel that intrusive stutter and mismatched animation would never make their way into one of their PlayStation products so it's disappointing to see that happen here.
It's still a unique experience for PC users, simply because multi-platform projects and even the odd PC exclusive aren't built quite like this. Horizon Zero Dawn looks and feels a class apart in many ways - and yes, you can increase graphics settings and improve resolutions and frame-rate compared to the PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro originals. However, where the game falls short is in its many technical failings.
When a game is content-complete but requires polish and bug-testing, it's considered beta code - and that's the impression we got from this conversion when we tested it, to the point where much of the reviewing process has been a case of testing and re-testing the game on multiple pieces of hardware to answer a simple question - is there something wrong with our kit or is the game at fault? It's a little bit of one and a lot of the other, but the bottom line is that there are many technical issues that need addressing to the point where not all of them can be included in this article. A 35GB day one patch arrived on the same day as the embargo lift - hence the delay in publishing our review - but the many and varied problems are still in effect in the code that makes its way to players.
It starts with the initial 'optimisation' phase on boot. Like a number of DX12 and Vulkan titles, shaders are compiled and stored the first time you play the game - as opposed to generating them during play, potentially inducing stutter. It's an extended process to say the least, it adds to the storage footprint, and if your drive fills up during this procedure, the game crashes to desktop - sometimes with an ominous 'fatal error'. While testing and re-testing across systems, the process could often stall and lock-up even when required storage was available. Beyond that, when I booted the game on my 4K screen in full-screen mode, something didn't look right. It turned out that Horizon was rendering at 4K, downscaling to 1080p, then upscaling to 4K again. Switching to the borderless display option fixes this (albeit introducing other issues), as does swapping back to full-screen mode from borderless. Bizarre.
So, for example, the reflections setting improves the quality of screen-space reflections - and the high preset is indeed of a higher quality than console-standard medium. However, the practical difference is minimal and the main disadvantages of SSR are not mitigated. A game based mostly in nature has very little in the way of reflective surfaces meaning that where there is a gain, it's not really significant. Similarly, the only real difference in shadow quality at the highest setting comes in the first cascade right in front of Aloy. It helps a touch with self-shadowing but not to any great degree. It doesn't change the range of shadow cascades or the distances at which they 'pop'. Even the texture setting is a little strange. Pushing the setting up increases texture quality further into the distance. There's the perception of increased detail, but it can also produce aliasing issues - leaving it on console quality medium is just fine. Speaking of texture quality, the anisotropic filtering setting simply does not work. My advice? Set it manually to 16x in your GPU control panel for an actual quality boost.
Various anti-aliasing options are available but of all of them, only TAA really does a good job - and thankfully it has a minimal performance hit. Two settings I do recommend boosting from console quality are model detail and volumetric clouds. The former increases the distance at which certain patches of grass or objects render further away from Aloy, reducing the pop-in effect - and it also increases the distance at which the higher quality versions of a model are rendered. So trees into the distance will look less cardboard and '2D-like' and show off more individual branches and leaves. Guerrilla's cloud rendering system is brilliant but computationally expensive.
If you were looking to utilise the game's dynamic resolution scaling for balancing performance, I do not recommend it at all, as it is overzealous to the extreme and coarse in its application. I observed a scene rendering at 55fps using native 4K at ultra settings on an RTX 2080 Ti, where DRS should deliver full frame-rate with a minimal resolution drop. Engaging dynamic resolution scaling did indeed get me to 60fps but pixel-counting saw that the game had switched resolution to 1080p to get the job done. To claw back a mere 5fps, the game had quartered resolution to do it. I'd recommend leaving DRS disabled.
Stutters in excess of 40ms, 70ms or over 100ms can happen as a cutscenes starts or ends, when a camera changes position in a cutscene, when a UI element updates for a quest, or when you are just walking around in the world not doing anything special in particular. This happens reproducibly across multiple graphics card and CPUs and chosen resolutions, impacting the fluidity of the game, producing an experience less consistent overall that the PlayStation 4 version, which has no such stutter.
I thought that dropping to console-level 30fps might solve the issue but the problem is that the 30fps cap within the game actually runs at 29fps, producing even more stutter. Also, if you are experiencing profound performance problems, make sure you have your mainboard properly configured for 16x PCIe bandwidth for the GPU. This one's on me but I didn't - my slot was set to 8x bandwidth and it hobbled performance, while switching up to 16x solve that particular problem. Going back to Death Stranding, PCIe bandwidth made no difference at all.
There are other issues that need to be addressed. Cutscenes run at arbitrary frame-rates but facial animation is locked to 30 frames per second - it doesn't look right, with an almost Wallace and Gromit-like effect. Another problem in cutscenes is how they were not authored around the idea of interpolated frame-rates above 30fps, so in some cutscenes you can see characters warp around during scene cuts. Mismatches in animation refresh are evident elsewhere: Horizon's tall 'stealth grass' runs at the correct frame-rate at all times, but the new dynamic plants and foliage added to the PC version are locked at 30 frames per second refresh instead. An unlocked frame-rate needs to mean just that - picking and choosing what can meet the limits of PC hardware and what remains locked to 30Hz shouldn't be an option. What's so baffling about this is that Guerrilla Games are perfectionists - I can't help but feel that intrusive stutter and mismatched animation would never make their way into one of their PlayStation products so it's disappointing to see that happen here.
