What are we really looking at here? A stone? An enemy? Does it matter compared to the glory of running Horizon Zero Dawn at the impressive resolution of 128 pixels wide by 72 pixels high? Yes, a YouTuber managed to play Horizon Zero Dawn at 72p, and this is not a typo.
The YouTuber in question is Kryzzp, who also uses zWORMz Gaming, and he ran the game with this absurd resolution to test the performance of an Nvidia GT 710, an ultra-economical video card that barely cost $ 40 as new in 2016. Incredibly, he manages to defend himself against one of the robotic enemies, although it is impossible to say how much ammunition he still had after doing so.
To put this 128×72 resolution in context, it’s really less than a modern graphing calculator like the TI-84 Plus CE, whose 320×240 screen has a lot more pixels. You can imagine the game looking like this on a Game Boy Advance, but it still didn’t hit the target: that 2001 laptop had a screen resolution of 240×160. However, the older TI-8E graphing calculators had a resolution of 96 x 64.
While watching someone struggling to play with a resolution that would have been considered bad 10 years ago can be funny, it is also intriguing – what other games can you play like this? It’s probably fun to post ultra-low resolution screenshots on the internet and make people guess what game they’re watching. “It is Grand Theft Auto or Forza? I can only see a car. ”
I think it’s safe to say that it almost changes to be aesthetically pleasing again. It’s like looking at an alternate reality game where Amiga-style graphics have remained in fashion forever, even after switching to 3D. It’s beautiful in its own way.
If you want to try to run it like this, you will need some low power hardware, as the available resolutions seem to depend on which video card you have. The integrated Intel HD 620 graphics on my ThinkPad are technically more powerful than the Nvidia GT 710, so the lowest resolution I was able to run the game on was 160×100 (after setting the game resolution to 50 percent). Not that I could actually run, as the mission asked me – I couldn’t read the button prompt on the screen.
