Horizon Zero Dawn for PC is a great idea that needs some work

Horizon Zero Dawn came out on PC a few days ago, which would have been an unlikely thing to say last year. This is one of the most acclaimed games available on the PlayStation 4, and Sony is not known for releasing its exclusive titles anywhere else – they are one of the biggest reasons to buy a PS4 in the first place.

In Horizon Zero DawnThe case is, however, the PC release makes obvious sense. The PS4 is on its way out, with Ghost of Tsushima last month marked the definitive big first-party release from Sony for the arrival of the PS5 later this year. And one of the biggest games announced for the PS5 is next year Zero Dawn follow up, Horizon Forbidden West.

Rereleasing Zero Dawn one has Frozen Wilds expansion on PC is then bad marketing for the PS5. Sony is not losing anything by making the game available to a new audience at this point in the PS4 life cycle, and maybe some PC gamers will be hooked enough to take an interest in the PS5 sequel if they would not otherwise . (I would not expect Forbidden West to make it to PC after several years.)

The thinking is loud, but it will only work if PC gamers actually have a good experience with it Horizon Zero Dawn. And while the overall quality of the game is not in doubt, the porting track does not appear to have received a similar level of attention to detail. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the most technically ambitious games of the PS4, but it’s designed for hardware that is far less advanced than most gaming PCs today, and it seems that many people do not get the experience that they expect.

I’ve played Horizon Zero Dawn installed on my PC (GTX 1080 / i5 6600K / 16GB RAM) with the day-one patch and the latest Nvidia driver, and the results have been decent or not spectacular. I can get it to run at high settings at 1440p while hovering over 50 frames per second, which appears smooth enough on a G-Sync monitor. I sometimes see stops and strains when entering a new area, which I thought might have something to do with the game loading a spinning hard disk. Then again, that’s how it went on PS4 too, and I do not remember a stutter.

The port comes with options to stabilize the performance, but in my experience they do not work great. Locking the game at a reasonably stable 30fps does nothing to repair the hitches. If anything, it just drives you to even lower frame rates when they happen. The same goes for dynamic resolution mode, which is meant to keep you at a solid frame rate, but does nothing of the sort. It only steps in when things are really chugging, and it seems to do so by going to the next step with full resolution instead of smoothly reducing the pixel count. But with the ‘original’ graphics preset, which, as far as I can tell, looks identical to the PS4 version, the frame rate mostly stays above 60, and the stuttering is greatly reduced.

One of the better reasons to play Horizon Zero Dawn on PC, it supports various resolutions and aspect ratios, including ultrawide monitors. After all, the hottest title of this game evokes sweeping visas and long haul distances. It looks as good as expected, but there’s a catch: the cuts still run at original resolution, with a strange blurry effect on the side of the screen instead of letterboxes. I appreciate the effort to make use of the screen space, but I think most people would prefer the option to simply display the 16: 9 cuts in their original format if they will not be rebuilt for 21: 9.

Compared to the most amazing PC port of Death Stranding, which shares the same Decima engine, Horizon Zero Dawn is much more taxing on hardware. The graphs do scale higher than that Death Stranding, which looked more or less the same as the PS4 game in terms of visual assets, but it’s harder to get playable results. Even without hooking up, there are some weird quirks – like certain animations that hang at 30 fps and anisotropic filtering doesn’t work at all – that Horizon Zero Dawn feel like it was not designed to leave the PS4. Death Stranding was a competent PC game from the beginning.

For more in-depth coverage on a variety of machines that I do not have the capacity to produce by myself, I recommend reading and reviewing Digital Foundryis excellent work on Horizon Zero Dawnis ‘deeply disappointing’ PC port. Between this, other reports, and Guerrilla’s own statement, it’s clear that the port is not properly optimized for the PC. Unfortunately, you just can not expect Horizon Zero Dawn to run as well as other PC games that are also on the PS4.

I want to repeat that again Horizon Zero Dawn has mostly been okay on my PC. It’s worse then Death Stranding, but nowhere so bad as Red Dead Redemption 2 (which eventually got fixed) at launch. I can play at higher graphics settings and frame rates than the PS4 version, and with ultrawide support, so in the end this is the best version for me despite the issues. But the reports on poor performance elsewhere are so widespread and distinct about a variety of hardware that I can not really recommend it until there is definitive evidence of comprehensive fixes.

I hope that happens and that the game performs well in the end, because it would be great if Sony would put more of their games on PC. But I also hope that all future ports get a little more time in the oven.

Horizon Zero Dawn is out now Steam, GOG, and the Epic games store.