As you will have observed, I’ve been quite impressed with Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC port. I’ve been in a position to get the game working easily at 60fps on High settings even on a lowly GTX 1060 through the course of my testing, and I’m additionally very keen on Horizon’s lovely ultrawide support, too.
Sadly, this hasn’t been the case for everybody during the last couple of days. Numerous experiences have emerged since Wednesday that Horizon Zero Dawn has been nigh on unplayable for plenty of members of the press, and our pals at Digital Foundry even went so far as saying it’s a “deeply disappointing” port. This hasn’t been my expertise of the game, and I have to admit I used to be barely baffled by the sheer variety of fixes Sony stated can be included within the Day One patch (which has since arrived). Even worse, there have been quite a few experiences that the patch hasn’t truly fastened these points in any respect. Here’s what’s been going improper.
First of all, I ought to level out that it hasn’t been plain crusing for everybody even inside RPS. Both Nate and our VidBud Colm have reported issues far worse than what I’ve skilled up to now, with frequent, usually random crashes sending the game into meltdown, and occasional body price stutters coming out and in of cutscenes.
But these niggles nonetheless pale compared to what different individuals have been experiencing. To provide you with a small flavour of it, each Digital Foundry and Ars Technica couldn’t preserve a gentle body price even with an RTX 2080 Ti and a high-end Ryzen 9 3900X CPU inside their PCs. Indeed, Digital Foundry additionally tried testing with the really helpful GTX 1060 like I did and bought vastly totally different outcomes, saying: “On optimised settings, the GTX 1060 can drop beneath 1080p30 with highly erratic frame-times, meaning that it’s performing worse than a PlayStation 4 with only a small visual uplift.”
I have to stress, I’ve not had these points. My GTX 1060 rig was completely able to hitting 1080p60 in-game on its High ‘Favour Quality’ settings, and at no level did I see it leaping everywhere in the store, both. I’ve additionally been testing the game on larger finish playing cards since I did my preliminary efficiency assessment on Wednesday, and my RTX 2080 Ti / Intel Core i5-8600Okay combo has been equally trouble-free. In my expertise, the built-in benchmark outcomes are a fairly correct reflection of the efficiency I get in-game, and I’ve seen a easy near-60fps body charges on the Favour Quality settings at 4K that don’t give even the slightest suggestion that one thing’s improper. For what it’s price, bumping the settings as much as Ultimate Quality gave me a mean body price of 50-odd fps in-game, which is only a contact down from the 55fps common produced within the benchmark, but it surely nonetheless appears to be vastly higher than what different shops have been in a position to obtain.
Horizon Zero Dawn’s high-end settings do appear to have been a selected downside, judging by the patch notes. Again, this isn’t my expertise of the game, but it surely was meant to have fastened “an issue where the frame rate would behave incorrectly in Ultimate Quality with a 3840×2160 resolution,” and “an issue where the game would have performance issues when running in High End 4K display resolution”.
There have additionally been points the place the body price would drop on sure paths, as properly streaming points on buildings close to the Mother’s Cradle settlement and when sure adaptive efficiency settings have been enabled, and a few have reported flickering issues after they change the game’s decision scale. To my information, these points haven’t been current on my construct of the game, so it’s tough to say whether or not they’ve been fastened or not.
Perhaps of higher concern are the recognized points that Guerrilla are at present trying into. Arguably the largest one is all that stuttering “during general world traversal, UI updates, quest updates, or camera swaps in cutscenes.” I’ve not skilled any of this exterior of the standard transient slowdowns that typically happen when huge combat scenes are kicking off, and even then my body price has solely dipped by 5-odd fps moderately than change into a whole slideshow. Sony stated “this is a high priority issue for us to investigate,” and I think about / hope it is going to be fastened in a future, imminent patch.
Another biggie is that the game’s Anisotropic Filtering settings simply straight up don’t work. This is what makes the feel particulars extra lifelike at totally different viewing angles, and the game’s useful in-game menu choices display what this implies in apply, as you may see beneath (click on to enlarge and so on):
- Low
- Medium
- High
- Ultra
Now, you could be pondering, “Are those actually four separate images?” and that’s a good criticism. You should look fairly onerous to see the variations in these 4 photographs, and I’m undecided I might have observed that is somebody hadn’t particularly advised me there was an issue with it. That stated, having now spent a good period of time squinting at numerous screenshots I’ve taken, it will seem that flip-flopping between the game’s 4 AF settings does certainly do naff all to the general high quality of the game.
Sony have stated that is additionally “a high priority issue for us to resolve” of their communications with us, and that’s honest sufficient. I’m certain there shall be some people who find themselves up in arms about this type of oversight, however as I stated, it’s definitely not one thing I might have observed by myself had somebody not put a giant indignant flare signal over it.
The different huge factor some individuals have observed is that a number of the game’s animations apparently solely refresh at 30fps, even when the remainder of the game is working at 60fps. Things like character’s facial expressions, eye blinks and different trivia that once more, I can’t say I observed throughout my testing. For this one, Sony say they “are exploring how we can improve this with a future update,” so not fairly as excessive precedence because the others, but it surely’s nonetheless very a lot on the to do listing.
There have additionally been issues with the game’s optimisation course of. This occurs the primary time you boot up the game, and in my expertise can take wherever from 10-15 minutes. It’s a long-ass time, and an immense irritation when it insists on doing it each time I swap out my graphics card for a distinct GPU. Indeed, Digital Foundry reported the game would ceaselessly crash throughout this stage, too:
“It’s an extended process to say the least, it adds to the storage footprint, and if your drive fills up during this procedure, the game crashes to desktop – sometimes with an ominous ‘fatal error’,” in response to Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia. “While testing and re-testing across systems, the process could often stall and lock-up even when required storage was available.”
At the chance of sounding like a damaged report, this wasn’t an issue for me both – and I’ve sat via that optimisation course of not less than a dozen instances within the final couple of days. According to Sony, the error is as a result of the “shader compilation process does not properly verify remaining storage space on user PC and can result in crashes if the user’s storage drive is low on space (compilation process requires additional ~2GB storage space),” however they didn’t give any type of time-frame or precedence indication on when this ‘known issue’ could be fastened.
I have to stress, I don’t imply to make mild of those points, as there are clearly some very critical issues happening right here. Equally, although, I’d hesitate to name it a foul or disappointing port, as a result of when it really works, it’s actually fairly one thing, and my expertise exhibits {that a} GTX 1060 is greater than able to delivering 60fps on its High ‘Favour Quality’ settings at 1920×1080 with out difficulty.
The entire factor jogs my memory of Red Dead Redemption 2‘s PC launch last year. Yes, it was frustrating that it straight up refused to even boot on my work PC for about a week after it came out while working perfectly fine on our living room PC downstairs, and it was unfortunate that its launch was mired by technical issues. But blow me down if it wasn’t nonetheless among the best games on PC in 2019 as soon as Rockstar lastly bought all these patches out.
I vividly bear in mind the identical factor occurring across the time of Dishonored 2‘s launch as well. I reviewed it on PC at the time and had zero issues with it, and I remember being absolutely baffled by the number of other outlets who, just like Horizon Zero Dawn, found it nigh-on unplayable on their respective PCs. But it got fixed, and is now rightly considered one of the best PC games of all time. And let’s not overlook outdated Monster Hunter: World both, which had numerous CPU issues within the run-up to launch and remains to be a little bit of a beast on the outdated efficiency entrance to today.
Does a disappointing launch make for a disappointing game, interval? I’m not so certain. It’s not just like the outdated days the place post-launch patches simply weren’t even a factor and also you needed to prefer it or lump it. It merely isn’t in a developer or writer’s curiosity to depart a game in that type of state any extra. Things will get fastened. It might take time, however these bugs shall be squashed finally, and an excellent handful (if not all) of those issues received’t exist any extra. It was annoying when Red Dead wouldn’t load, certain, however inside per week I used to be using spherical that attractive wilderness having a right old whale of a time and I’ve hardly ever considered these launch points since.
Naturally, I shall be preserving a detailed eye on Horizon Zero Dawn’s patch standing over the approaching days and weeks, and can do my finest to maintain you updated with what’s happening. I had hoped to complete my huge graphics card take a look at as we speak to point out you what sort of efficiency you may anticipate to see by yourself PC, however with such drastic issues occurring elsewhere with Horizon’s PC port, I’m now going to delay that till the start of subsequent week. If you’re planning on taking part in Horizon Zero Dawn as we speak, I actually hope your expertise falls on my finish of the dimensions moderately than Digital Foundry’s, as there’s a lot to get pleasure from right here, each from a technical point of view and the game itself, as you may see from Nate’s Horizon Zero Dawn review. And even when you don’t, fixes are coming. I urge endurance, as a result of goodness is aware of there are extra necessary issues we ought to be getting indignant about lately.
