One of the most technologically-advanced games on PlayStation 5 is coming imminently to PC. Horizon Forbidden West is acclaimed for its beautiful rendering and smooth performance on PS5, and we were fascinated to see how porting specialists Nixxes have adapted it to PC - and to see how accurate its recommended specs are in-game. The studio continues to work on and refine the game up until launch, but we have had around a week with preview builds and can offer our initial impressions.
Either way, the frame-time issues we saw with GPU-based DirectStorage in Ratchet and Clank are not visible here - and while we're on the topic of stutter, it's good to see that the initial load of the game is accompanied by a shader precompilation step. It takes about a minute on a venerable Ryzen 5 3600 processor, and just under half that on a top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
When setting the PC version to a dynamic 1800p with DLSS using an RTX 3070, image quality is markedly superior to PlayStation 5's performance mode - but then, you might expect that from a GPU of this class. Beyond that then, I tried an RTX 2070 Super running at dynamic 1440p with DRS and found that, although a touch blurrier than PS5's 1800p checkerboard performance mode, more detail was resolved.
The specs say that an RTX 3070 can achieve 1440p at 60fps at high settings - but even in the game's opening areas, you're actually in the 50s. That's fine for VRR displays of course, but only with dynamic resolution scaling do you get closer to a sustained 60fps. Of course, the console version is using DRS too - and checkerboard rendering - to hit its own 60fps target. It works there quite well and I highly recommend using it on PC too to maximise performance and graphical quality.
Dynamic resolution scaling ensures consistent frame-rates. RTX 3070 achieves a consistent 1800p60 with DLSS, while RTX 2070 Super does the same with 1440p60 - with occasional dips beneath on that card in some cutscenes. Speaking of changes, there are some things that I would like the game to add in future updates. As of right now, there is no FSR 3 frame generation, but Nixxes has mentioned it to me - so I assume it is coming, but maybe not as a launch feature. Likewise, I would like to see slightly more dynamic resolution control with the ability to customise the top and bottom resolution if possible, and perhaps allow for finer grain frame-rate limiting above and below the refresh rate.
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