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HHorizon Forbidden West it’s a sequel that takes what worked in the original and turns it up to eleven with a larger open world that’s full of vibrant places to explore and endless things to do. Guerilla Games has finally brought this wonderful experience to PC with the help of Sony-owned Nixxes Software, the same team that helped develop the PC port of Dawn Zero.
The transition from PS5 to PC in terms of gameplay is obviously quite smooth, but how does it work on a technical level? How far can you push the game on PC? And what are the performance metrics? With this technical analysis, let’s take a look at Forbidden Horizon West on PC and how it compares to the PS5 release.
Computer requirements, test bench specifications and graphics settings menu
To run Forbidden Horizon West on a PC with low configurations, you need at least an 8th Gen Intel Core i3 with a 4GB GTX 1650 and 16GB of RAM. However, if you want to increase the settings to medium or high, you will need an 8th generation Intel Core i5 with RTX 3060 and 16 GB of RAM.
Additionally, you’ll also need to have 150GB of space available, and a PCI e 4.0 SSD is recommended for best performance, as the game takes advantage of the Windows DirectStorage API. For our tests, we ran the game on a PC with an AMD Ryzen 5950X, Nvidia RTX 3080Ti, and 32GB of RAM. This is well above what the game recommends, so we had the freedom to increase the settings to the maximum without compromising the resolution.
Starting with the settings menu, Forbidden Horizon West offers a wide range of graphical sliders to choose from ranging from texture quality to anti-aliasing and more. The helpful tags do a good job of informing what these settings actually do, but having screenshots or corresponding clips that actually demonstrate the visual differences between these settings would have been much more convenient. If you’re not interested in tweaking the settings, you can always skip the individual sliders and choose from high, low, and medium presets depending on your settings.
PC Performance
Given our benchmark specs, we were able to run the game at maximum settings. We increased the resolution to 4K, enabled V-Sync and Nvidia Low Latency, and enabled dynamic resolution scaling to 60 percent using DLSS sampling. Unlike Horizon Zero Dawn and other Sony ports that require shader compilation, Forbidden Horizon West finally solved this problem and it boots without any annoying build. That said, there are a few seconds of shadow compilation that occurs during the transition from a cut scene to gameplay, but it’s not that impactful in the grand scheme of things.
Coming to performance, our test PC was able to handle it Forbidden Horizon West with its maximum settings without any problems. Frame rates averaged between 60-65 fps and the experience was pretty smooth across the board. Guerilla Games has done a fantastic job of conveying the beauty of Forbidden Horizon WestThe PC-to-PC post-apocalyptic world, and everything from lush jungles to clear waterfalls and fields of bright flowers, looks absolutely gorgeous on PC.
The character models also show plenty of detail with complex skin meshes and physics-based materials that react properly to light, and the same goes for the impeccably detailed machines we’ll be fighting with during our adventure. Smooth movement and animations shine at 60fps, and our test team was able to move along just fine. Forbidden Horizon West it was able to maintain the frame rate even during intense fight sequences without breaking a sweat. That’s not to say there weren’t any frame rate drops, but they were rare enough to not be a big deal.
How does the PC version build with the PS5 launch?
Forbidden Horizon West on PC features some great quality-of-life improvements over the PS5 version, with two of the most notable features being multi-screen and ultra-widescreen support. Players with compatible screens can play in full from Forbidden West in a 32:9 aspect ratio, and the developers have taken care to ensure that the stretched ratio doesn’t cause any rendering issues.
Additionally, you’ll also see an uncapped frame rate option, meaning you can run the game at more than 60 fps as long as you have the necessary hardware. There are also better texture filtering options, the ability to switch between the PS5’s stunning sky systems or the PS4’s relatively rudimentary implementation. Interestingly, however, Forbidden Horizon West on PC does not support hardware accelerated ray tracing. Like the console version, all the reflections are of the screen space type, but it seems like a missed opportunity as it could help make the PC version much more graphically impressive.
Forbidden Horizon West it also makes good use of the Windows DirectStorage API to quickly load game assets into memory and reduce time spent staring at loading screens. During our testing, loading a save only takes about 15 seconds or so from the main menu, and fast travel was just as quick.
Taking a moment to compare the PS5 favor resolution mode to the PC version at max settings, there aren’t too many major differences to spot. Both versions of the game are broadly identical, but there are a few places where the PC version takes the lead over its PS5 counterpart. Thanks to 16x anisotropic filtering, textures look slightly better on PC than PS5. Similarly, the level of fidelity in distant objects is also higher on PC than on PS5, and the internal rendering resolution also seems higher. Again, these are mostly iterative updates rather than sweeping changes over the PS5 version. All things considered, Forbidden Horizon West it’s still a beautiful game regardless of whether you’re playing it on PC or PS5.
Conclusion
Nixxess Software has done a great job with this port allowing PC gamers to witness the next chapter of Aloy’s journey without any hassle. It’s clear that PlayStation has learned from its past mistakes with the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn, as this translation is much smoother, with no rendering inconsistencies or long shader compilation times. All things considered, Forbidden Horizon West on PC not only does it look great, but it also runs great with little to no frame rate drops during our testing. If you didn’t get a chance to play Forbidden Horizon West on PS5, this edition of the game should also serve you well if you have the PC hardware to back it up.
Source: gamingbolt.com