Horizon Forbidden West PC Performance Review

ign.com:

Horizon Forbidden West is one of the best-looking games on consoles, period – a statement that now extends to PC thanks to this port from Nixxes, the Sony-owned studio responsible for the recent PC ports of PlayStation games like Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. While this is a cross-generation game, the PS5 is where it pushes the fidelity needle most, so that’s what we’ll be using for the main console comparison. Compared to the PS5, this PC port loses none of the quality and, depending on the machine, can even exceed it. It also comes with one big and welcome improvement – Nixxes has added real-time render options via a transparent menu, a genius touch that aids PC market’s desire to fiddle, offering immediate and, most importantly, visual changes to the games rendering.

The top end RTX 4090 can max all the sliders at native 4K. These choices, however, miss out on some of the best features and use of the hardware. The game ships with Guerrilla’s own TAA solution, but is complemented with all flavours of reconstructed image options – DLSS3, FSR2.2 and Intel’s XeSS are all available to upscale the image back to your target output. Comparing the PC best to the PS5’s best, we see very minor increases. Texture filtering can be pushed higher to 16x, with the PS5 hovering around 4 to 8x depending on the texture in question, along with very high shadows offering better filtering than PS5 in its Fidelity mode, as well as more objects in the shadow cascade.

This was confirmed in our chat with Nixxes, which you can read below. In addition, depth of field (DoF) can run cinematic quality during gameplay, and level of detail can see a miniscule increase with slightly fewer imposter sprites used. The most obvious leaps come in extended FoV which can see approximately 5% of an increase in performance on some machines. There’s also options for ultrawide monitors, including for the real time cinematics, although turning the black bars off can cause