Horizon: Zero Dawn

Digital Foundry recommended settings, except textures on Ultra (which has no performance impact anyway):


Exited out to desktop to turn off VSR, only to find I would have to sit through the opening cutscene again before I could get back to the benchmark. Nope.

Not sure wtf they were thinking with that weird ass blur-pillarboxing in cutscenes, but for anyone playing it ultrawide there's apparently a fix: How to fix Horizon Zero Dawn Ultrawide Issues on PC (Steam/EGS) Didn't bother trying it myself as I'm not actually playing the game on PC, but it looks like it works.

For whatever reason, runs well for me at 1440p;


Settings (+ 16x Anisotropic filtering forced in Control Panel since the game setting doesn't work);


And here's one with everything max but motion blur off;


This ebay 1080ti continues to put in work.

Barellron said:

For whatever reason, runs well for me at 1440p;
View attachment 293073

Settings (+ 16x Anisotropic filtering forced in Control Panel since the game setting doesn't work);
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And here's one with everything max but motion blur off;
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This ebay 1080ti continues to put in work.

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Seems to top the other benchmarks in here seeing as it is a 1080ti compared to others who have 2080ti. Could it be 32gb RAM helps with the frames in this game?

Well the 2000 series benchmarks here are either at 4K or with low RAM, I haven't seen one yet at 1440p. The performance is all over the place either way. The game doesn't use a lot of RAM (after the initial shader compile) but shutting down almost everything else running on my computer, beyond fixing the constant crashing, definitely gave me an unexpected performance boost. Normally when I'm gaming I have some bullshit open on a second monitor; Twitch, Discord, Spotify, etc. with no impact to the game but this one doesn't like to share, fullscreen or otherwise.

Yeah, the post-patch ACG video said 4K was still pointless even on his 2080Ti, and he was sticking with 1440p too. You can gain a few more frames by dropping AO to Medium (DF video showed their implementation was kind of busted above that, and it takes considerably more GPU power too), and it's a game that really doesn't like to be run in borderless mode.

Also, it's an AMD-optimized game.

Vorph You can hit Alt+F4 during that intro cinematic, it will ask if you want to quit, click NO.

That will skip you straight to menu.

My poor 1070 GTX. New screen raped it.

Aazrael said:

My poor 1070 GTX. New screen raped it.

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Use Digital Foundry settings, Ultimate image quality is barely improved for a massive fps hit. Play it fullscreen too. Still might be a bit short of 60, especially in bad weather fx, but it'll be a hell of a lot more playable than ~34.

Vorph said:

Use Digital Foundry settings, Ultimate image quality is barely improved for a massive fps hit. Play it fullscreen too. Still might be a bit short of 60, especially in bad weather fx, but it'll be a hell of a lot more playable than ~34.

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Yea I only used Ultimate to see the diference from my 1080p benchmark. Will check that guide, turning down to Original quality and its 50-60is fps.

40-50fps when playing with the custom setting. Eagerly waiting for the new GPUs to come out though.

Punko said:

That is in line with my own expectations and what others posted.

Woefully Inept posted this:

View attachment 292821

Which looks terrible on a 2060 .. until you notice he only has 8 gb of ram.

Woefully, fix that shit unless its on purpose to suit your username.

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Oh yes this is much better. Thanks for ridiculing my pitiful amount of RAM. Not bad for a $43 upgrade. lol

Hateyou said:

I kind of just want to play this to do that benchmark thing. Don’t want to pay for it again and just got done playing it a couple months ago tho so I won’t but I want to see how the new rig does with my current shit gfx vs new when I upgrade soon.

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That's exactly why I grabbed FitGirl's repack of it. I've got no interest in paying $50 to play the PC version when my PS4 save was on Very Hard and had done everything possible prior to DLC/NG+, and I own the complete edition there already. 60 fps and ultrawide are nice but I'd need a $2-3k monitor to make me like it more than my TV these days.

Woefully Inept said:

Oh yes this is much better. Thanks for ridiculing my pitiful amount of RAM. Not bad for a $43 upgrade. lol

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Try the DF recommended settings and you should be able to hit 60 fps.

I'll save people the trouble of finding it in their video:

Jaggies suck, but I'm not really a fan of post-process AA and temporal (aka vaseline filter) AA either. If those are the only options, I will try to use VSR instead. I tried 5K2K in HZD and even 30 fps might have been iffy, so that was out.

Bottom line, I miss the days when game engines could still do MSAA.

Vorph said:

Bottom line, I miss the days when game engines could still do MSAA.

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Goddamn right. Why did AAA titles abandon MSAA and SSAA? Did Nvidia pay everyone off so they could profit off minor performance improvements for 3 years?
Edit: I guess it won't matter much if DLSS really takes off.

Unreal Engine popularized deferred rendering which rules out MSAA in most cases.

SSAA is essentially the same thing as doing VSR/DSR in your GPU drivers. Only real benefit of having it in-game is that the UI can be rendered at native resolution instead of being scaled along with the rest of the image.

Makes sense.

So, performance discussions aside -

This game is amazing. Story, atmosphere, characters, world building all top notch. Especially loved the trial-by-fire first encounter in the Frozen Wilds. Combat is really satisfying with mouse aiming and I'm glad I waited to play it on PC, just hope the sequel doesn't take as long for PC release. But given the random crashing and mixed reviews, Guerilla will probably shop around for a different port producer next time and it will take even longer.

The Time of Day slider in photo mode is a nice touch;




Time to knock these out;

Digital Foundry settings posted above, on new UW monitor. I'm having some issues though with 144hz on this new AOC screen, so I'll be trouble shooting it. This was just at 60hz, and after playing on a TN panel at 144hz capability, it was pretty jarring on those long swooping camera motions.

Crashed to desktop'ed my way through the story and did the last mission today. Enjoyed it a lot besides the crashing and lowish performance. Started the Frozen Wild but think I might wait for a fix until I continue. So damn annoying being set back when the game fucks up and throw you to the desktop.