Death Stranding, the more recent of the two Decima engine games was ported to PC earlier. It built on Horizon: Zero Dawn’s open world chops and excellent character animation. It was also one of the best-optimized titles on PC in 2020. To top things off, it featured an implementation of NVIDIA’s DLSS AI-based upscaling technology that looked better than native 4K with TAA.

Considering that Death Stranding was one of the finest PC ports we’ve seen in a while, expectations have been pretty high for Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC, especially since the two share a common engine. How well has Horizon: Zero Dawn transitioned to PC? How do PC users gain relative to the PlayStation 4 Pro code? Let’s take a look and find out.

Minimum and Recommended specs:

Like Death Stranding, Horizon: Zero Dawn’s minimum and recommended specs are quite forgiving. What’s interesting is how the minimum  and recommended graphics cards are all in roughly the same performance tier.

The minimum requirements need an AMD FX 6300 or Intel Core i5-2500K, 8 GB of memory, an AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780. And the recommended specs require a Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i7-4770K, 16 GB of memory and AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB) or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB).

Guerilla Games claims that the recommended specs are for a 1080p/60 FPS experience with the “original” settings preset selected. Relative to a lot of newer games, these are very forgiving specs, with the exception of that 100GB storage requirement. It’s nice to see the Sandy Bridge i5-2500K still hanging in there  after close to a decade. Even the recommended CPUs, the Ryzen 5 1500X and Core i7-4770K are lower midrange at this point.

There’s a very small performance delta between the minimum and recommended GPUs here. The R9 290, for instance, regularly hands in frame rates within 10 percent of the RX 580. The VRAM gap is more pronounced, however. This tells us that if you’re running a 4GB card, even a lower-tier one like the RX 570, you won’t have to drop all settings to “Favor Performance.” Just drop textures a notch and you should be good to go. We experienced excellent performance all around: if you have a higher-end system like our GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and Ryzen 9 3900X combo, you should easily hit 60 FPS at 1440p, and 4K is possible with just a bit of tweaking. The image quality settings that we’ll talk about, notably “Adaptive Performance” help a lot here.

Graphics settings: a decent amount of headroom for tweaking

Horizon: Zero Dawn offers a decent number of graphics settings to tweak in order to eke out better perform or exceed the visual standard of the PlayStation version of the game.

As a reminder, the PS4 Pro gave users two options. One of them allowed for better resolution and the other better performance. For the purpose of this comparison, we have only considered the resolution mode which runs the game at checkerboard 4K resolution at a stable 30 fps. We analysed the PS4 Pro’s performance by taking some sample scenes from the game and running it through trdrop, an open source software. Note that this tool gives us a mere demonstration of the game’s performance, because an exact 1:1 representation of performance can only be provided by the developers themselves since they have access to vast of array of tools and profilers.

Interestingly, Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC features switches out “medium” presets for “original,” which appears to be a close match for the PlayStation 4 Pro edition of the game. This is one of those cases where medium (or “original” in this case) isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Drop all those settings to original and you get the PlayStation 4 Pro experience with headroom for higher framerates and a higher resolution output. The other setting presets also have slightly different names. Instead of Low you have “Favour performance,” and High and Ultra are replaced by “Favour Quality” and “Ultimate” respectively.

As mentioned, “Original” equates to the original PlayStation 4 version of the game and there are two entire quality presets above that push the boat out on PC. Apart from the graphics settings themselves, there are a number of Display settings players can tweak to adjust image quality to their liking. These include:

• Preset
• Textures
• Model Quality
• Anisotropic Filtering
• Shadows
• Reflections
• Clouds
• Anti-aliasing
• Motion blur
• Ambient Occlusion

And there are display settings which you can tweak which include:

• Display resolution
• Field of View
• Adaptive Performance
• FPS Limit
• Render Scale
• Refresh rate
• V-Sync
• HDR

Preset is self-explanatory. Adjust the preset changes all other graphics settings to the desired preset. If you just want a PlayStation 4-equivalent experience, drop this to “original” and you’re good to go, and you’ll have a healthy amount of performance headroom to boot.

Texture quality is a setting you’ll want to tweak if you have a graphics card with 4GB of VRAM or less. Cards like the 4GB GTX 1050 can benefit from the “Favour Performance” setting if you experience stuttering. If you have a 6GB or 8GB graphics card, you should easily be able to enable “Ultimate.” As this isn’t a from the ground-up graphics overhaul for PC, actual texture quality isn’t a big step above the PlayStation code, even on the higher settings. Instead, higher texture setting levels cache more textures on VRAM, meaning less texture pop-in, important when paired with PC’s higher draw distance.

Model Quality adjusts the geometric complexity of meshes in-game and also the distance at which LODs kick in. Horizon: Zero Dawn featured some of the most accomplished main character models we’ve seen this entire generation. This means that, even at “Original,” geometry looks incredible. At higher settings, high-poly meshes are pushed further out into the background. If you’re running the game at a native 4K, “Favor Quality” or “Ultimate” can add a significant amount of detail in the distance, though at the expense of a substantial performance hit.

Anisotropic filtering adjusts the quality of textures presented at an oblique angle. This especially affects floor and ceiling textures. In modern games —and Horizon: Zero Dawn is no exception — Anisotropic filtering has a negligible performance hit on PC. You want to leave this at x16 in-game. Alternatively, just enable x16 Anisotropic filtering globally in either the NVIDIA or AMD control panels.

Shadows and Reflections: These two settings adjust the resolution of shadows and reflections and how far out they’re rendered. At lower settings, you see fewer screen-space reflections, with a lower resolution overall. Original quality shadows don’t exactly look bad. However, if you want fine shadow filtering  and distant shadow LODs, you’ll want to enable “Ultimate.”

The Clouds setting controls the complexity of the game’s volumetric cloud rendering. Horizon: Zero Dawn’s cloud rendering tech was remarkable back in 2017. At higher settings, PC offers a genuinely improved experience here with fluffier, complex cloud models.

Anti-aliasing allows you to select between the game’s accomplished TAA filtering, with relatively low blur and excellent coverage, camera-based AA, FXAA, SMAA, or to simply disable it. The game claims that camera-based AA looks the best. However, we found that TAA, together with a sharpening pass with Image Sharpening in the NVIDIA control panel offered excellent AA coverage and optimal image quality.

Motion blur has a single off/on toggle and enables or disables the game’s camera-based and object-based motion blur.

Ambient occlusion controls indirect shading on objects. While original looks fine, higher presets have a higher sample count and better filtering for a more refined look.

Display settings: tweaking image quality for optimal performance 

Apart from the actual graphics settings, Horizon: Zero Dawn has a number of Display settings you can adjust to get performance just right. Resolution is, obviously, a biggie. It’s ideal to run the game at your native display resolution. However, dropping this down can help, though you could just use the included “render scale” option to do this in-engine. It’s important to note that Horizon: Zero Dawn supports ultra wide resolutions, so if you have a 21:9 display, the game should work out of the box.

Field of view adjusts the game’s FOV. A higher FOV presents more of the game world than the rather compressed console-friendly field of view on the PlayStation 4. However, more of the world is rendered at higher FOVs so there is a bit of performance impact. We suggest leaving this at default or increasing it a bit if you sit close to the monitor.

Render scale, adaptive performance, and FPS limit all work together to help you nail down a consistent level of performance. Unfortunately, the adaptive performance implementation doesn’t work well right now — it can drop your pixel count by over 75 percent in certain cases. Render scale lets you reduce the maximum resolution. Dropping down to 0.9 can give you a notable performance boost with a negligible hit to image quality. FPS limit lets you manually limit the frame rate. Again, this feature doesn’t seem to work right with the launch code. We suggest using a third-party FPS limiter like RTSS instead.

Horizon: Zero Dawn offers a double-buffered V-Sync option. We suggest leaving this disabled and enabling adaptive V-Sync with triple-buffering through your GPU control panel if you want a relatively stutter-free experience. RTSS scanline sync is another welcome alternative.

Horizon: Zero Dawn’s excellent HDR implementation does make its way over to PC. You might have some trouble with Windows 10’s HDR settings. However, once you get things to work, the game looks stunning on displays with proper HDR support.

Conclusion:

All in all, we’re happy with Horizon: Zero Dawn’s PC port. While performance isn’t quite where it should be — especially in comparison to Death Stranding, it’s great to just have this excellent first-party title on PC at all. Native support for ultra wide monitors is a big plus. And while performance issues and some broken settings are problems, this is a far better day-one experience than Red Dead Redemption 2, for instance.

"Horizon is a post-apocalyptic game where robotic animals, including horses (Striders), sabertooth tigers (Sawtooths), and T-rexes (Thunderjas), roam the world. The story follows Aloy, a young girl who is outcast from the Nora tribe at birth."

If you’re not familiar, Horizon is a post-apocalyptic game where robotic animals, including horses (Striders), sabertooth tigers (Sawtooths), and T-rexes (Thunderjaws), roam the world. The story follows Aloy, a young girl who is outcast from the Nora tribe at birth because she is “motherless.” As she grows up, she learns to hunt with spear and bow from Rost, another outcast entrusted with raising her. One day, she stumbles into the ruins of the Old Ones, the technologically advanced humans that came before, which are forbidden by the Nora religion. There, she finds a Focus, a piece of wearable tech that allows her to interact with old technology, scan areas, and outline the tracks of the machines.

Determined to get answers about who she is and why she was cast out, she convinces Rost to train her for the Proving, a Nora ceremony where young members of the tribe are officially recognized as braves. She would become a member of the tribe simply by finishing, but the winner is granted a boon – largely anything they want – from the Matriarchs. Aloy’s plan is simple: win the Proving and force them to tell her who she is. Things escalate from there, of course, and soon Aloy finds herself traveling far beyond the Nora’s Sacred Land in search of answers to much bigger questions that I won’t spoil.

This is where Horizon begins to falter. If you’ve played any open world RPGs in the last decade plus, you’ll have a good idea of how Horizon works. You’ll harvest plants and pluck wood from saplings for healing supplies and crafting materials, kill rabbits, foxes, and boars for yet more crafting materials, and hunt the giant robotic beasties prowling the land for even more parts, which can be used to upgrade and modify your bow, tripcaster (a device that allows you to place tripwires on the ground), and other weapons. As you travel, you’ll run into strangers who you’ve never seen before and will never interact with again once you’re done with them. They have troubles, you see, troubles that they are incapable of solving themselves and are happy to dump onto you, a strong passing adventurer. After you mine them for information using Horizon’s rendition of Mass Effect’s dialogue wheel, Aloy, who is remarkably social and open for a woman who spent her entire life until this point being shunned by all but two people, has the option to help them out, though she won’t commit, you know. Player agency and all that.

"Like many of the elements Horizon borrows from other titles, the skill tree feels like it’s here because the expectation is that it will be, not because it makes the game better."

The side missions that follow are predictably rote. They usually take one of three forms: using Aloy’s Focus (which gives her Horizon’s version of Detective Vision) to track somebody down, slaughtering bandits or machines (or both), or getting something for somebody. In one, I track down a mentally ill man and reunite him with his sister before the voices in his head make him hurt someone. In another, I track down a man’s priceless family sword before helping the thieves who stole it recover a missing man in exchange for its safe return. One merchant wants me to find vessels used by the old ones. He’s convinced they were used for elaborate beard-shaving ceremonies, but they were really just coffee mugs. It’s funny sure, but the quest is still a collecathon. Another sees me retrieving a family spear and a missing daughter for a grieving widower, or joining my buddy Nil, an unusually honest ex-soldier who kills bandits because he loves violence, for a raid on several bandit camps. I enjoyed some of these quests greatly, mostly because of the characters involved – Nil’s refreshingly honest hunger for violence made me stop every time I saw him – but it doesn’t change how banal they were.

Story missions are better and better presented, but they’re equally predictable, requiring many of the same things as the side quests – track this person, search this area, kill some bandits or small machines – before throwing you into a combat arena filled with a big machine, several human enemies, several big machines, or both. Killing machines in these environments generally involves setting a trap or two, then flinging arrows at them as Aloy rolls around like a madwoman to avoid being hit. Against humans, you’ll generally want to crouch in the tall grass, Assassin’s Creed style, before whistling at enemies, Assassin’s Creed style, so they’ll come over and you can kill them, Assassin’s Creed style, before moving on to their friends. Their friends, of course, are idiots who do absolutely nothing about the pile of bodies gathering around your bush save remark on it as they march into your waiting spear. Again, this is not to say that there’s no fun to be had here, because there is, but it’s disappointing how much of it is so repetitive.

The game has a leveling system and a skill tree, of course, which is fine, but it locks a number of basic skills – like the ability to whistle from a bush, or kill silently – behind it. You unlock these early on, but that, combined with Horizon’s leveling system, which assigns a recommended level to each quest, can sometimes mean grinding out sidequests you don’t want to do to get the abilities and stats you need to continue the plot. Horizon isn’t too bad about level-gating; I managed to clear the opening areas of side quests, which gave me a lot of experience and made the others optional, but holding me back from playing the story and hiding basic abilities behind a skill tree doesn’t make sense, and is particularly irritating. Like many of the elements Horizon borrows from other titles, the skill tree feels like it’s here because the expectation is that it will be, not because it makes the game better.

"Horizon is at its best in the in-between moments when you’re traveling the world. When you’re stalking a  Sawtooth, setting traps along its path with your tripcaster, using your ropecaster to tie down a machine so you can override it with your spear, climbing some tall peak just because, riding your overridden horse machine through the vast emptiness."

If it isn’t obvious yet, Horizon’s core issue is that it has an identity crisis. It has all of these mechanics it has borrowed from other games but doesn’t do anything interesting with them. It’s a game that tells you to determine how Aloy responds in Mass Effect-esque dialogue – your options are conflict, compassionate, and clever – while rarely offering you the ability to do so and using its dialogue wheel to throw exposition at you. It offers you side missions galore, but builds them around uninteresting mechanics – Detective Vision, bush stealth, fetch quests, etc – and repeats them ad nauseum.

Horizon is at its best in the in-between moments when you’re traveling the world. When you’re stalking a  Sawtooth, setting traps along its path with your tripcaster, using your ropecaster to tie down a machine so you can override it with your spear, climbing some tall peak just because, riding your overridden horse machine through the vast emptiness, looking for the next thing. In areas where you can prepare, set traps, and engage on your own terms, Horizon is great. Weapons fell wonderful, enemy feedback is fantastic, machines have unique tactics and are fun to fight, and you can do crazy things, like shoot guns off of machines and use them against them. In these moments, Horizon soars. The game also impresses when it takes an old idea and does something new with it. Tallnecks, for instance, are Horizon’s answer to the Ubisoft tower. By climbing it, Aloy can override it and fill in her map. The distinction is that Tallnecks move, forcing you to reach high places to jump onto their backs, and climb up from there. The additional challenge here, combined with the creatures roaming around near them and the limited number of times they appear in the game, make Tallnecks something the Ubisoft towers never managed to be: fun.

One of Horizon’s best features are Cauldrons, hidden labyrinths of wires and old tech. Conquering them means sneaking past the machines inside, and learning how these robots were created. They end in a boss fight against a particularly nasty machine and reward you with the ability to override new machines so you can either ride them or have them fight for you. They’re great areas that combine the game’s intriguing backstory with interesting environments and good combat encounters, and I found myself exploring more of Horizon’s world just to run into them.

"Horizon was a gorgeous game in 2017 and it’s gorgeous today. It comes with all of the graphics options you’d expect on PC, including a much-appreciated FOV adjustment. The initial optimization informed me that I should be running the game on medium settings, but I managed to run it on Ultra in all but the most intense encounters at mostly stable framerates."

The world itself is gorgeous, of course. Sweeping plains rise into high mountains and ruins of the old world jut from between the trees that have reclaimed them. Massive cities tower atop mountains while the most dangerous creatures stalk the savannah. Horizon was a gorgeous game in 2017 and it’s gorgeous today. It comes with all of the graphics options you’d expect on PC, including a much-appreciated FOV adjustment. The initial optimization informed me that I should be running the game on medium settings, but I managed to run it on Ultra in all but the most intense encounters at mostly stable framerates. There were dips, even when I turned the settings down to High, but nothing ever swung below the high 40s.

Even here, however, Horizon isn’t perfect. There’s a distinct difference in the quality of the models, animations, and voice acting between the major characters and the minor ones – seriously, seeing a minor character smile is the stuff of nightmares – and the lip-synching alternates between quite good and awful.

The game also has storytelling issues: Aloy only really ever acquires a personality beyond cracking wise or being kind except during a few key points and he character motivation consists of “find the truth.” Beyond that, I could never tell you what she wanted or cared about. Even major, traumatic instances in her like just fade into the background as the plot carries her forward.

"When it’s allowed to be itself, Horizon is something special. But for each moment Horizon is excellent, so much of it is derivative and unengaging."

She also has the incredibly annoying habit of narrating absolutely everything she does. It makes sense, most of the time. She was an outcast; she talked to herself because she was lonely. When she’s planning, tracking someone, examining a area, or trying just making the odd comment, I don’t mind. But when she says something like “the fire – it’s burning it!” when I shot a fire arrow at a machine, or commented on how the plants I’ve been eating to heal since the first couple hours could “come in handy,” – and let me tell you, this kind of stuff happens a lot – it made me yearn from the days of silent protagonists. She’s engaging enough, sure, and I liked her, but I wish she was more fleshed out.

The same issue applies to the other major characters. Horizon has the open-world game problem: these characters only exist in the plot so far as their story overlaps with Aloy’s. They rarely have character arcs or get to do anything beyond deliver exposition and give Aloy things to do. There are exceptions, yes – I particularly liked Erend and Avad, for instance – but once their part in the story is done, you never see them again. In that same vein, villains are brought up and expended as needed. You’re told they’re powerful and causing all this trouble, and then you foil their plots, meet them once, and beat them. Then they’re gone. The result is that few characters outside of Aloy seem to matter, storylines end anticlimactically, and it’s often hard to be emotionally invested in much of the main plot or characters because you know you’ll never see them again once their purpose has been served and the narrative moves onto the next thing.

If I come off as overly harsh here, I don’t mean to. I like Horizon and I’m going to play more of it. When it’s allowed to be itself and the focus is on combating giant machines with fun weapons, Horizon is something special. Sliding under a Watcher as it jumps at you before shooting out its eye, hitting the perfect dodge against a leaping Sawtooth, turning a Thunderjaw’s heavy weapons against it – those moments feel great. But for each moment Horizon is excellent, so much of it is derivative and unengaging. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good game. But it isn’t a great one. At its best, accompanying Aloy on her journey is wonderful. Like a Cauldron, it pumps out the same thing you’ve seen over and over again. But when Horizon is confident, when, like Aloy, it casts off the burden of expectation and is nothing other than itself, it’s something wonderful.

This game was reviewed on the PC.