is it fully corrected? • Eurogamer.net

With the announcement of new PlayStation PC exclusives, starting with Days Gone this spring, it was time to return to Horizon Zero Dawn, Sony’s first attempt to wear one of its triple-A masterpieces. the most famous. When it came out, the performance and overall quality of the user experience was poor, but six months later, there’s no question that the game has improved dramatically. It’s not perfect, it’s still far from ideal, but Guerrilla Games has taken the feedback into account and fixed a lot of issues, while significantly improving performance in some scenarios.

Even just by loading the game, there are some immediately apparent differences. When the game was first released, booting the title at 4K resolution saw Horizon render internally at the correct resolution, before switching to 1080p, then back to 2160p – this issue is now fixed. The initial shader compilation that took so long throughout the day is now done in the background, allowing you to visit the settings screen while it’s in progress or even start the game (I would recommend leaving the shader caching process terminate). The menus themselves remain pretty much the same, but the various v-sync options now work fine too, without the massive performance that borderless windowed mode had when the game was launched. Anisotropic filtering? This was also snapped on release, requiring an adjustment to the GPU control panel to improve details, but now it works as it should.

These are basic things but it’s good to see it fully fixed. The same goes for dynamic resolution scaling: at launch, running at ultra 4K on an RTX 2080 Ti could see a targeted scene running at 54 fps, so the DRS should only need to change. slightly down the resolution to bring us to 60 fps – but instead the resolution dropped. at 1080p instead (!). You guessed it, it’s fixed now, and I would now recommend turning on DRS if you are using a fixed frame rate like 60 fps. AMD’s FidelityFX Adaptive Contrast Sharpness (CAS) is also added to the menu system: it’s just a sharpness filter, but I think it’s a nice improvement for those who want to increase the contrast to higher levels. lower resolutions and using TAA anti-aliasing.

Before we move on to the deeper issues we encountered with the release code, there is a lingering issue that I would like to see fixed. Ambient Screen Space Occlusion (SSAO) appeared to have been bugged at launch in that the radius of the shading effect decreased at higher resolutions when using higher quality settings. It’s still the same with the latest patch 1.10, so while it might sound odd, I would still recommend the medium setting here. I would also recommend the medium setting for texture quality. Just like the launch version, engaging a higher setting does not seem to change the LOD bias – this can produce more detail in the distance, but there is the risk that with too much texture detail occupying too few pixels, you will end up with an unwanted glittering alias effect.

In the game, almost every issue we had has been fixed or, at the very least, mitigations have been made. At launch, the weed animation added to the PC version only worked at 30 fps when the rest of the game was unlocked – this has now been fixed. Other issues with 30 fps, such as Aloy’s hair animation, are also fixed. Another issue with frame rate was the general awkwardness of the 60fps cutscenes, as the game was apparently designed around a fixed 30fps update. Characters may appear to warp in different positions on camera cuts: this no longer happens. However, there is now a new effect – the one we see in a lot of games, actually – a character freeze effect during transitions as the rest of the world continues to update. It’s not a big deal, but it’s there, and it’s noticeable. This is, however, an improvement over the previous warping effect.

In terms of in-game issues, the worst issue – stuttering on camera cuts, while traversing, or even when UI elements are presented – has been improved but still isn’t quite right. The stuttering is now reduced, but there still seems to be a snapping issue where the UI appears with a new message: it’s no longer a frame-time stutter, but rather a jump in motion. I’ve noticed this a few times throughout my piece and it’s noticeable, but it’s less annoying than the momentary freeze seen in the post code. All in all, the experience is definitely improved across the board, but there are still some quirks – like a thin black outline that sometimes frames the entire presentation.

Beyond polish and stability, performance was a real issue back then. Nvidia GPUs based on the Pascal architecture of the 10 series suffered particularly, to the point that the GTX 1060 offered worse performance in places than the much less capable PlayStation 4 GPU. Its closest AMD counterpart – the Radeon RX 580 – performed better, but over 6TF of computing power was unable to consistently double the performance of the 1.84TF PS4 graphics core. There is good news and bad news here. Whether it’s thanks to the optimization from Guerrilla Games, improvements to the Nvidia driver, or a mix of the two, the GTX 1060 is now much, much more efficient. The improvement is significant: the benchmark registers a 65% increase in performance, while instant stuttering is significantly reduced.

The RX 580 sees fewer interesting differences. In the benchmark, the overall performance is the same, but the first cinematic of the game shows a lot more interesting improvements with the higher overall frame rate, while the general optimizations that we have already talked about see a much lower level. to stutter. That said, it’s worth pointing out that as we move further into the game, the level of performance of the game was seen when launching on this GPU, while the GTX 1060 continued to show a great improvement. Indeed, if we put the two “ old timer ” GPUs back to back, they are now very homogeneous in a world where games generally favor one over the other. This is rather interesting because I would have thought that AMD’s GCN architecture would show an advantage in a console-centric title.

So what have we learned from this re-evaluation of the game and are there any takeaways about how future Sony ports might perform? Obviously, we don’t really want to see this play out on future Sony titles. Well, Horizon Zero Dawn is improved a lot and it’s no longer a “ mediocre ” PC conversion, but it’s also not particularly exceptional – there are still issues such as the animation stuck. wobbly cinematic camera change, the rather odd animation playback shake, and the fact that I still think the game generally underperforms on PC compared to consoles. Even with matching console settings with low-quality anisotropic filtering and average picture quality at 1080p, we should expect GPUs like RX 580 and GTX 1060 to perform well beyond PlayStation 4 results. Taking the RX 580 as an example, to see an AMD GPU with more than 3 times the computational performance of the PlayStation 4 less that 60 fps is disappointing – and doesn’t match the performance upgrade seen on other well-balanced console ports.

But then again, Horizon Zero Dawn was never meant for a cross-platform launch and runs on an engine that wasn’t designed to be on anything other than PS4 – and it wasn’t meant to run on anything else, either. than 30 frames per second. And that’s where other Sony proprietary titles might see a smoother transition to the PC. For example, take Days Gone – the next Sony conversion slated for spring. It uses Unreal Engine 4 as a base that should help cross-platform conversions, whereas we have already seen with the PlayStation 5 patch that simply removing the 30 fps cap makes the game perform very well at 60 fps – and maybe. to be beyond. We’ve seen similarly improved performance with Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, and even the OG disc version of The Last Guardian. Obtain PC ports law isn’t easy, but there is some evidence to suggest that at least arbitrary frame rates may be less of a problem on some proprietary Sony titles. As to how far Sony pushes these ports – and what improvement we’ll see over the original PlayStation games – well, that remains to be seen, but we’ll take a look at each of them as we go. they arrive.