Horizon Forbidden West: Best PC builds look a lot like Guerrilla options for PlayStation 5

Now that Horizon Forbidden West is available on PC and we've had plenty of time with the final game, we can tie up some loose ends that were left hanging after last week's first look. What are the optimized configurations like? What about Steam Deck? And are there any lingering issues that need to be addressed in future updates?

Starting with those all-important optimized settings, we had additional insight into how to make our selections thanks to our in-depth conversation with Guerrilla Games and Nixxes, as documented on Eurogamer last week. For example, some settings are there for completeness, but they won't really affect performance on most gaming PCs. Take ambient occlusion as an example. There is an SSAO option and the ability to disable it, and that's it. The performance gain from disabling it is of no consequence, so keep it up. The same goes for screen space shadows. These options may exist for the benefit of the Steam Deck and ultra-low-spec hardware, but should be left enabled for most users.

Beyond that, there are some presets that can be safely 'taken to the max' in the best PC tradition without impacting performance too much. PS5 offers many of its textures with 4x anisotropic filtering, but the cost of texture filtering is minimal on PC, meaning 16x is perfectly viable. I'd want an 8x detail increase over the console version, but on an RTX 3070, there's no performance hit going up to 16x. Hair quality can also be run at maximum (i.e. “high”) as it matches PS5 and although lower quality settings are available, the frame rate increase is negligible, even in native 4K on the same RTX 3070.

Horizon Forbidden West PC – Optimized Settings vs PS5 – The DF Breakdown

Beyond that, things get more interesting. As expected, the level of detail scales the quality of the geometric LODs at a distance. Going down to high improves performance by eight percent, medium by 14 percent, and very low by almost 20 percentage points. The optimized settings aim to deliver the highest quality possible at a fair performance cost, and I would recommend high here as the difference to the medium is noticeable. The same goes for shadows, where there's a welcome 10-point boost when dropping from very high to high. There are more advantages to scaling down further, but the shadows become blurrier and aliased.

Another important parameter is the quality of translucency. The PS5's equivalent performance mode is “default,” which appears to run things like water at quarter resolution, and for good reason: on an RTX 3070 the default setting is 17 percent faster than the preferred high option. resolution. However, the default value is fine and can prevent big drops in frame rate in busier scenes.

The quality of the cloud is a very interesting option. In some scenarios you may not notice any difference between the settings and the temptation may be to downscale here, but if you are using scalers like DLSS, FSR2 or XeSS, they will scale from even lower resolutions, resulting in aliasing and artifacts. of extinction. So on PS5, the lower resolution Performance mode actually uses a higher quality preset than the Quality mode to mitigate the effect. Considering it's not much more expensive even at native 4K on an RTX 3070, I suggest the very high setting for optimized settings if you're upscaling from a lower or high resolution on native.

*We recommend high or very high texture settings (they are very similar) but 8GB GPU users should not use high settings at resolutions above 1440p.

Another easy win for in-game performance is to adjust the depth of field quality down, offering a five-stop increase, but that's it for the optimized core settings. The others have little impact on performance or quality improvements. With all that in mind, the PS5 equivalents are fine and are invariably set to high settings.

However, GPU VRAM is important. If you have an 8GB GPU, the high texture quality setting is perfectly fine and effective if you run the game up to 1440p. At resolutions higher than 1440p you will need more VRAM for high textures; otherwise you will be paging from system memory and performance will crash. How Horizon Forbidden West scales its textures varies by scene (the video above explains it all, but ultimately the medium may be fine for some views, but not so much for others).

When switching to an RTX 2070 Super (essentially a bit slower than the 2080 and a long-term DF favorite for console equivalency), there is a 12 percentage point advantage from maximum settings to optimized equivalents. It's not a gigantic win, but in terms of image quality, the PC wipes the floor with the PS5's checkerboard performance mode when using DLSS along with dynamic resolution scaling. You're getting huge performance gains over native resolution, plus the boost of optimized configuration settings. DRS is widely used in all PS5 modes and you should also use it on PC. It's a game changer.

Horizon Forbidden West PC vs PS5: Improved features, performance tests + image quality improvements.

Moving on, I was excited to try the game on the Steam Deck, but with the current version, I would advise against it. Even at 720p on the lowest settings with dynamic resolution scaling, I had real trouble maintaining 30 frames per second. Others may disagree, but the poor performance and simplified visuals make it best to leave it for now. Another problem is that the problems found in the PC version of the game are greatly amplified on the Steam Deck. A Ryzen 5 3600 has noticeable frametime spikes in terrain traversal, and it's much worse on the Steam Deck: a huge cascading drop in performance with a stutter that eventually goes away. This happens throughout the game world when you move and I feel like it takes a lot away from the experience.

Scenes still have occasional, ultra-intense GPU usage at random points and on the Steam Deck it's even worse, momentarily dipping into the single digits. Ultimately, the existing problems with the PC build are greatly increased on the Steam Deck. This Nixxes port mainly uses resources from PS5, and not PS4, which could have been more appropriate. Even after fixes, this may end up being a game that is indeed “too big for the Steam Deck.”

Beyond that, we should discuss reconstruction. DLSS and FSR2 are present in line with our many previous reviews, but there is something wrong with XeSS when using its DP4a path on non-Intel GPUs. The image is generally very smooth and all particles are presented with gigantic blurry artifacts. Using XeSS on a real Intel Arc GPU based on the ML path produces improved results, but jittery clouds and other post-processing issues are somewhat unpleasant. Intel and Nixxes have work to do here, as the performance level of my Arc A770 is not great, even with dynamic resolution scaling.

So there are issues to address, but ultimately, Horizon Forbidden West landed in good shape on PC (with a new patch addressing HDR issues) and we can highly recommend it.