Horizon Forbidden West is a sequel that takes what worked in the original and amps it all up to eleven with a bigger open world that’s bursting with vivid locales to explore and a myriad of things to do. Guerilla Games has finally brought this wonderful experience to PC with the aid of Sony-owned Nixxes Software, the same team that assisted in developing the PC port of Zero Dawn.
The transition from PS5 to PC in terms of the gameplay is obviously pretty smooth, but how does it fare on a technical level? How far can you push the game on PC? And what are the performance metrics? With this technical analysis, we take a look at Horizon Forbidden West on PC and how it compares to the PS5 release.
PC Requirements, Test Bench Specifications, And Graphics Settings Menu
To run Horizon Forbidden West on a PC with low settings, you need to at least have an Intel Core i3 8th generation with a GTX 1650 4 GB and 16 GB of RAM. However, if you would like to bump the settings up to medium or high, you would need an Intel Core i5 8th generation with RTX 3060 and 16 GB of RAM.
Additionally, you would also need to have 150 GB of available space and a PCI e 4.0 SSD is recommended for the best performance since the game takes advantage of Windows’ DirectStorage API. For our tests, we ran the game on a PC comprising an AMD Ryzen 5950X, Nvidia RTX 3080Ti, and 32 GB of RAM. This is well over what the game recommends, so we had the liberty of cranking the settings to maximum without compromising on the resolution.
Starting off with the settings menu, Horizon Forbidden West gives a vast breadth of graphical sliders to choose from ranging from texture quality to anti-aliasing and much more. Helpful labels do a good job of informing what these settings actually do, but having corresponding screenshots or clips that actually demonstrate the visual differences between these settings would have been a lot more convenient. If tinkering with settings isn’t your thing, you could always skip the individual sliders and choose from high, low, and medium presets depending on your configuration.
PC performance
Given our test bench specifications, we were able to run the game at maxed out settings. We turned the resolution up to 4K, turned V-Sync and Nvidia Low Latency on, and turned dynamic resolution scaling to 60 percent through DLSS upsampling. Unlike Horizon Zero Dawn and other Sony first party ports that require shader compilation, Horizon Forbidden West has finally solved this issue and it starts up without any annoying compilation. That being said, there are a few seconds of shader compilation that happens during the transition from a skipped cutscene to gameplay, but it isn’t all that impactful in the grand scheme of things.
Coming to the performance, our test PC was able to handle Horizon Forbidden West on its maxed out settings without any issues. Frame rates were averaging around anywhere from 60fps to 65fps, and the experience was pretty smooth across the board. Guerilla Games has done a fantastic job of transporting the beauty of Horizon Forbidden West’s post-apocalyptic world to PC, and everything from the lush jungles to clear waterfalls and bright flower fields looks absolutely gorgeous on the PC.
The character models also exhibit a ton of detail with complex skin meshes and physically based materials that react appropriately to light, and the same goes for the immaculately detailed machines that we get to fight during our adventure. The movements and fluid animations shine at 60fps, and our test rig was able to chug along just fine. Horizon Forbidden West was able to maintain the frame rate even during intense fight sequences without breaking a sweat. Not to say that there weren’t any frame rate drops at all, but they were rare enough to not be much of an issue.
How Does The PC Version Build Upon The PS5 Release?
Horizon Forbidden West on PC features some excellent quality-of-life improvements over the PS5 version, with two of the most notable features being support for multiple displays and ultrawide screens. Players with compatible displays can play through the entirety of Forbidden West in a 32:9 aspect ratio, and the developers have taken care to ensure that the stretched-out ratio doesn’t cause any rendering issues.
Furthermore, you also get to see an uncapped frame-rate option, meaning you can run the game well over 60fps provided you have the required hardware. There are also better texture filtering options, the ability to switch between the PS5’s impressive sky systems or the PS4’s comparatively rudimentary implementation. Interestingly though, Horizon Forbidden West on PC doesn’t feature support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Much like the console version, all reflections are of the screen space kind, but it does feel like a missed opportunity given that it could help in making the PC version a lot more graphically stunning.
Horizon Forbidden West also makes good use of Windows DirectStorage API to quickly load game assets into memory and reduce the time spent looking at loading screens. During our tests, loading a save takes only about 15 seconds or so from the main menu and fast travels were equally snappy as well.
Taking a moment to compare the Favor Resolution mode on PS5 with the PC version at max settings, there aren’t too many major differences to spot. Both versions of the game are identical in broad strokes, but there are a few places where the PC version takes the lead over its PS5 counterpart. Thanks to 16x anisotropic filtering, the textures look marginally better on the PC than on the PS5. Similarly, the level of fidelity in distant objects is also higher on PC than on PS5, and internal rendering resolution also looks to be higher. Again, these are mostly iterative upgrades as opposed to radical changes over the PS5 version. All in all, Horizon Forbidden West remains a beautiful game regardless of whether you play through it on a PC or a PS5.
Conclusion
Nixxess Software has done a great job with this port allowing PC players to witness the next chapter of Aloy’s journey without any hassles. It’s clear that PlayStation has learned from its past mistakes with the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn, as this translation is a lot smoother with no rendering inconsistencies or long shader compilation times. All in all, Horizon Forbidden West on PC not only looks good but also performs great with little to no frame rate drops during our tests. If you didn’t get the opportunity to play Horizon Forbidden West on PS5, this edition of the game should serve you pretty well too should you have the PC hardware to back it up.
Share Your Thoughts Below (Always follow our comments policy!)