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Now that Horizon Forbidden West is out on PC and we’ve got had a great deal of time with the ultimate delivery sport, we are able to tie up some unfastened ends that had been left hanging after final week’s first look. What do optimised settings appear to be? What about Steam Deck? And are any lingering points that must be addressed in future updates?
Kicking off with these all-important optimised settings, we had extra perception into making our picks owing to our in-depth dialog with Guerrilla Video games and Nixxes, as documented on Eurogamer final week. For instance, some settings are there for completeness’s sake however will not actually impression efficiency on most gaming PCs. Take ambient occlusion, for starters. There’s an SSAO possibility and the flexibility to show it off – and that is it. The efficiency win in disabling it’s inconsequential, so maintain that on. It is the identical factor with screen-space shadows. Such choices might exist for the good thing about Steam Deck and ultra-low spec {hardware} however they need to be left on for almost all of customers.
Past that, there are some presets that may safely ‘whacked as much as max’ within the most interesting PC custom with out an excessive amount of in the way in which of a efficiency hit. PS5 delivers lots of its textures with 4x anisotropic filtering, however the price of texture filtering is minimal on PC, that means 16x is completely viable. You’d need the element improve of 8x over the console model however on an RTX 3070, there isn’t any efficiency impression in any respect in going as much as 16x. Hair high quality will also be run at max (ie ‘excessive’) as that is a match for PS5 and whereas decrease high quality settings can be found, the frame-rate increase is negligible – even at native 4K on the identical RTX 3070.
Horizon Forbidden West PC – Optimised Settings vs PS5 – The DF Breakdown
Past that, issues get extra fascinating. As you might count on, stage of element scales the standard of geometric LODs at a distance. Taking place to excessive improves efficiency by eight %, medium by 14 % and really low by practically 20 proportion factors. Optimised settings are all about delivering as a lot high quality as potential at an equitable efficiency price – and I would advocate excessive right here because the distinction vs medium is noticeable. It is the identical with shadows, the place there is a welcome 10 level increase by dropping from very excessive to excessive. There are additional wins by cutting down additional, however shadows turn into blobbier and aliased.
One other vital setting is translucency high quality. The PS5 efficiency mode equal is ‘default’ which appears to run parts like water at quarter decision and for good cause – on an RTX 3070 the default setting is 17 % quicker than the preferable excessive decision possibility. Default is okay, nevertheless, and should stop massive frame-rate drops in busier scenes.
Cloud high quality is a really fascinating possibility. In some situations you might not discover a distinction in any respect between settings and the temptation could also be to go low right here, however when you’re utilizing upscalers like DLSS, FSR2 or XeSS, they are going to be upscaling from even decrease resolutions, leading to aliasing and fizzle artefacts. So, on PS5, the decrease decision efficiency mode truly makes use of the next high quality preset than the standard mode to mitigate the impact. Contemplating it isn’t way more costly – even at native 4K on an RTX 3070 – I recommend the very excessive setting for optimised settings in case you are upscaling from a decrease decision, or excessive at native.
| PC Optimised | PS5 Efficiency | PS5 40fps Mode | PS5 High quality | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texture High quality | GPU Dependent* | Very Excessive | Very Excessive | Very Excessive |
| Texture Filtering | 16x | 2x/4x/8x | 2x/4x/8x | 2x/4x/8x |
| Shadow High quality | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Depth of Subject | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Degree of Element | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Terrain High quality | Excessive or Very Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Crowd High quality | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Hair High quality | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Ambient Occlusion | SSAO | SSAO | SSAO | SSAO |
| Display-Area Reflections | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Water High quality | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive | Excessive |
| Cloud High quality | Very Excessive | Excessive | Very Excessive | Excessive |
| Translucency | Default | Default | Excessive Res | Excessive Res |
| Parallax Occlusion Mapping | On | On | On | On |
* We advocate excessive or very excessive texture settings (they’re very related) however customers of 8GB GPUs shouldn’t use excessive settings at resolutions increased than 1440p.
One other straightforward win for efficiency in gameplay is adjusting the standard of depth of subject down, providing up a 5 level increase – however that is it for core optimised settings. The others have little efficiency impression or high quality wins. With all of that in thoughts, PS5 equivalents are tremendous and so they’re invariably pegged on the excessive setting.
Nonetheless, GPU VRAM is vital. If in case you have an 8GB GPU, the excessive texture high quality setting is completely tremendous and performant when you run the sport as much as 1440p. At resolutions increased than 1440p you will want extra VRAM for prime textures, in any other case you may be paging from system reminiscence and efficiency will collapse. How Horizon Forbidden West scales its textures varies on a per-scene foundation (the video above explains all however in the end, medium could be tremendous for some views, however much less tremendous for others.
Switching over to an RTX 2070 Tremendous (basically a contact slower than the 2080 and a long run DF favorite for console equivalence), there is a 12 proportion level lead dropping from maxed out settings to optimised equivalents. It isn’t a huge win, however when it comes to picture high quality, PC wipes the ground with PS5’s checkerboard efficiency mode when utilizing DLSS together with dynamic decision scaling. YUou’re getting big will increase in efficiency over native decision plus the increase from the optimised settings tweaks. DRS is used closely in all modes on PS5 and you must apply it to PC too. It is game-changing.
Horizon Forbidden West PC vs PS5: Enhanced Options, Efficiency Exams + Picture High quality Boosts!
Shifting on, I used to be excited to check the sport on Steam Deck however with the present model, I would advise towards it. Even at 720p on lowest settings with dynamic decision scaling, I had actual points sustaining 30 frames per second. Others might disagree, however the poor efficiency and stripped again visuals make it one to go away for now. One other situation is that points discovered within the PC model of the sport are massively amplified on the Steam Deck. A Ryzen 5 3600 has noticeable frame-time spikes in terrain traversal – and it is worse on Steam Deck: an enormous cascading efficiency drop with a stutter that then ultimately clears up. This occurs all around the sport world whenever you transfer round and I really feel prefer it takes away from the expertise drastically.
Cutscenes nonetheless have occasional, ultra-heavy GPU utilisation at random spots and on Steam Deck it is even worse, momentarily dipping into single digits. In the end, current points with the PC construct are blown up giant on Steam Deck. This Nixxes port is utilizing PS5 property primarily – and never PS4, which can have been a greater match. Even after fixes, this will find yourself being a sport that’s certainly ‘too massive for Steam Deck’.
Past that, we should always talk about reconstruction. DLSS and FSR2 current in keeping with our many prior analyses – however one thing’s up with XeSS utilizing its DP4a path on non-Intel GPUs. The picture is mostly very mushy, with all particles presenting with big smearing artefacts. Utilizing XeSS on an precise Intel Arc GPU based mostly on the ML path produces improved outcomes – however the vibrating clouds and different post-processing points are considerably off-putting. Intel and Nixxes have work to do right here because the efficiency stage on my Arc A770 shouldn’t be scorching, even with dynamic decision scaling.
There are points to deal with then, however in the end, Horizon Forbidden West has landed in tremendous kind on PC (with a brand new patch addressing HDR points) and we are able to extremely advocate it.
