With the announcement of more PlayStation exclusives coming to the PC, starting with Days Gone this spring, the time seemed right to return to Horizon Zero Dawn, Sony’s first attempt to port one of its most celebrated AAA masterpieces. At launch, the overall performance and quality of the user experience was poor, but six months later there is no question: the game has improved dramatically. It’s not perfect, it’s still far from ideal, but Guerrilla Games received onboard feedback and corrected many of the problems, while dramatically improving performance in some scenarios.
Even just loading the game, there are some differences immediately apparent. When the game first launched, initializing the title in 4K resolution saw Horizon render internally at the correct resolution, before reducing it to 1080p, then increasing it back to 2160p – this has now been fixed. The initial build of the shader, which used to take so long in the past, is now done in the background, allowing you to visit the settings screen while it is in progress or even start the game (I would recommend leaving the shader cache process complete, However). The menus themselves remain pretty much the same, but the various v-sync options now work correctly too, without the massive drop in performance from borderless window mode when the game was released. Anisotropic filtration? This was also broken at launch, requiring an adjustment to the GPU’s control panel to improve the details, but now it works as it should.
Alex Battaglia presents the current status of the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn.
This is basic, but it is good to see that it is completely corrected. The same goes for dynamic resolution scaling: at launch, running in 4K ultra on an RTX 2080 Ti you can see a targeted scene operate at 54 fps, so DRS should just slightly adjust the resolution down to bring us to 60 fps – but instead, the resolution dropped to 1080p (!). You guessed it, it’s fixed now, and now I would recommend that DRS be enabled if you’re running at a fixed frame rate like 60fps. AMD’s FidelityFX contrast-adaptive sharpening (CAS) has also been 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 at lower resolutions and using TAA anti-aliasing .
Before we move on to the deeper issues we had with the release code, there is a persistent problem that I would like to see resolved. The screen space environment (SSAO) occlusion appeared to be bugged at launch, as the radius of the shading effect decreased at higher resolutions when using the higher quality settings. This is still the same with the latest patch 1.10, so while it may seem strange, I still recommend the average setting here. I also recommend the medium setting for texture quality. Like the release version, involving a higher setting only seems to adjust the LOD bias – this can I produce more details from a distance, but there is a danger that, with many details of texture occupying few pixels, you will get an undesirable sparkling aliasing effect.
In the game, almost all of the problems that we had were solved or, at least, mitigations were made. At launch, the grass animation added to the PC version ran only at 30fps when the rest of the game was unlocked – this has now been fixed. Other issues related to 30fps – like Aloy’s hair animation – have also been fixed. Another problem related to the frame rate was the general constraint in the scenes at 60fps, as the game was apparently designed around a fixed 30fps update. The characters may appear to be transforming themselves into different positions in the camera cuts: it doesn’t happen anymore. However, there is a new effect now – which we see in some games, in fact – a freezing effect on characters in transitions when the rest of the world continues to update itself. It is not a big problem, but it exists and it is noticeable. It is, however, an improvement over the previous warp effect.
Our original report on the Horizon Zero Dawn port for PC – was fundamentally a profound disappointment, but major improvements have been made over the course of the month.
In terms of problems with the game, the worst problem – stuttering in camera cuts, during the crossing or even when the user interface elements are presented – has been improved, but it is still not certain. Stuttering is now reduced, but there still seems to be a hitch problem in which the UI appears with a new message: it is no longer a stutter in frame time, but a leap in motion. I noticed this a few times throughout my game and it is noticeable, but it is less disturbing than the momentary freeze seen in the launch code. Altogether, the experience is definitely improved across the board, but there are still oddities – like a thin black outline that frames the entire presentation at times.
In addition to polishing and stability, performance was a genuine problem at that time. Nvidia GPUs based on the Pascal Series 10 architecture suffered particularly, to the point where the GTX 1060 delivered performance that was worse in some ways than the PlayStation 4 GPU, much less capable. Its closest AMD equivalent – the Radeon RX 580 – did better, but more than 6TF of computing power has not been able to consistently double the performance of the 1.84TF PS4 graphics core. There is good and bad news here. Whether by optimizing Guerrilla Games, improving the Nvidia driver or a mix of both, the GTX 1060 is now much, much more effective. The improvement is great: the benchmark records a 65 percent increase in performance, while stuttering is currently reduced to a great degree.
The RX 580 sees fewer interesting differences. In the benchmark, the overall performance is the same, but the first scene of the game shows a lot more interesting improvements with the overall frame rate being higher, while the general optimizations we talked about already have a very low level of stuttering. That said, it is worth noting that advancing the game has reduced the level of performance of how the game looked at launch running on this GPU, while GTX 1060 continued to show a big improvement. In fact, if we put the two ‘old’ GPUs one after the other, they are now very uniform in performance in a world where games often favor one over the other. This is quite interesting, as I expected AMD’s GCN architecture to show an advantage in a console-centric title.
Days Gone running on PS5 dramatically improves the game – a hint of what the next PC version can offer?
So, what have we learned from this reevaluation of the game and is there any conclusion about how Sony’s future ports can work? Obviously, we don’t want to see this situation get worse in future Sony titles. Well, Horizon Zero Dawn is much improved and is no longer a ‘bad’ conversion for PC, but it is also not particularly noticeable: there are still some problems, like the crash of the scene change animation of the unstable scene, the strange shock in the reproduction of the animation and the fact that I still think that the game generally underperforms on the PC compared to the consoles. Even in console configurations combined with low quality anisotropic filtering and average 1080p image quality, we should expect GPUs like RX 580 and GTX 1060 to be able to go far beyond the results of the PlayStation 4. Taking the RX 580 as an example, to see a GPU AMD with more than 3x the computing performance of the PlayStation 4 deliver any less than 60fps is disappointing – and does not match the performance upgrade seen on other well-rounded console ports.
But again, Horizon Zero Dawn was never intended for a cross-platform launch and operates on an engine that was not designed to be anything other than the PS4 – and it was also not designed to run at anything beyond 30fps. And this is where the other original Sony titles can see a more elegant transition to the PC. For example, think of Days Gone – Sony’s next conversion due sometime in the spring. It uses Unreal Engine 4 as a base that should help with cross-platform conversions, while we have already seen with the PlayStation 5 patch that just removing the 30fps limit allows the game to run well at 60fps – and possibly beyond. We saw similarly improved performance with Ghost of Tsushima, God of War and even the OG disk version of The Last Guardian. Getting PC ports right it is not easy, but there is evidence to suggest that arbitrary frame ratios may at least be less problematic in some original Sony titles. As for how far Sony takes these ports – and how much of an improvement we will see over the original PlayStation games – well, that is yet to be seen, but we will be looking at each one as and when they arrived.