Horizon Forbidden West PC - Optimised Settings vs PS5 - The DF Breakdown

now that Horizon forbidden West is out on PC and we've had more time with the game I can tie up some loose ends that were left hanging after the release of my preview video so in today's shorter video covering Horizon forbidden West on PC I look at a few key areas optimize settings what do those look like steam deck can you play it there and lastly are there any issues that have crept into the launch version that you should be aware of so first first and foremost let's get to those optimized settings and given everything I've gleaned from the developer interview that can be viewed on the Euro gamer website I know that this game is going to have some settings which barely affect the frame rate on PC but others that are going to be key to getting better performance let me first start with some of those least important settings and go from there ambient inclusion there is only one ssao option here at all and the performance won back by turning it off is not at all worth the negative impact it has on lighting quality so definitely keep that on same with screen space Shadows turning those off does not greatly impact performance yet you'll lose significant Shadow detail keep that on Beyond those binary settings there are some other settings you should leave to their highest without much thought such as anisotropic filtering as I showed in my last video a great number of textures on PS5 in both of its modes run at forx anistropic filtering as is typical for many console games on PC though the performance cost for AF is minimal reducing from 16 to 8X sees no performance Improvement even at 4k on an RTX 370 which is a resolution that would be greatly straining the GPU lower levels like Forex only marginally Aid performance for what I would consider a visually significant loss in quality here I recommend 16x for optimized settings another setting like that is hair quality at its highest high setting it's the same as what is found on PS5 and reducing the quality lower on something like the RTX 370 even at 4K is not greatly impacting performance in the gameplay sequence here this setting exists essentially for legacy and Ultra low-end components like steam deck so keep the high setting here after these more straightforward optimizations things do get more interesting let me first start with level of detail and here the setting increases the quality of geometric lods at a distance going down to high improves performance by 8% medium by 14% and very low by nearly 20% here I find that the added LOD popping from medium to be a bit too much yet I find very high to be too expensive for the admittedly small return in visuals so I recommend the high setting here similar situation for Shadows going down to high from very high increases performance by 10% where I think it looks pretty much the exact same as very high in All Views going down to medium and lower though may healthily increase performance by 20% or more but Shadows are a lot Blobby and alias in motion I recommend the high setting for that reason another important setting setting is translucency quality at the default setting it is like that which is found on the PS5 performance mode you can see how the transparency effect for this waterfall here in the distance renders at what appears to be quarter of the screen's internal resolution it can be obvious like it is here in this shot but it is used on the PS5 performance mode for very good reason if you're targeting 60 FPS with highr transparency it could be a challenge on the 3070 as we show here the default setting runs 177% fast faster than the highres setting when a transparency is taking up a lot of screen space as we can show here I would say it is worth it to turn down this setting if you're targeting 60 FPS and if you're targeting a lower frame rate like 40 R30 you can keep it to high res next we have Cloud quality and this one is interesting in a shot like here of the game running at Native 4k on the ARX 3070 I can say that you'll barely see a difference in the static shot in quality yet you'll see a healthy increase to Performance when you go to medium and below so based on the shot you might just say well go with low it's an easy and invisible win but I would say this is not advisable mid to low range gpus in this game are invariably going to be using things like dlss FSR 2 and xcss and they will be upscaling from lower resolutions like we can see here with 1440p dlss and performance mode at lower internal resolutions like we see here if you had the clouds to low you'll see a greater amount of breakup aliasing and fizzle in the clouds on low settings and I think that could be actually visually distracting given how often clouds occupy the screen in this game on the very high setting in comparison I would say the fizzle is greatly lessened it's for this similar reason that nix's told us that the PS5 version in its performance mode uses the very high setting for clouds but the quality mode uses just High that's due to the differences in internal resolution concerning it is not too much more expensive even at Native 4k on the 3070 I will suggest the very high setting for optimized settings if you're upscaling from from lower resolutions like many will be another easy win for performance in gameplay is adjusting the quality of bokeh depth of field down here we can see the high setting for depth of field decreases the quality of depth of field in gameplay and offers a nice little 5% bump in performance while the depth of field is on screen and I think it only looks slightly artistically different that's definitely an optimized setting right there and that is it for the core optimized settings I would say other settings in the game do not need mentioning I would say as they have essentially imper able performance or quality wins beyond the core optimized settings though I need to talk about the texture quality setting as I mentioned it in my last video as it is more GPU specific and important as I described in that video if you have an 8 GB GPU the high texture quality setting is perfectly fine and performant if you run the game up to 1440p at resolutions higher than 1440p you will need more vram for high textures as 8 GB GPU performance will plummet above 14 40p due to overcommit vram and dipping into system memory like we see here with this footage of the RTX 3070 running at 1800p the performance is very very poor in such circumstances in such a case as we can see here setting textures to medium at a higher resolution than 1440p on an 8 GB GPU like the 370 will keep performance in check and it'll be great but what does that mean for texture quality check out this shot here of the game's various texture qualities when looking at the ground at this camera distance I would say the difference between high and very high is imperceptible for these textures the higher M maps that might be there are lost at this distance but going down to medium and low we can see some interesting Behavior where most of the textures stay of similar quality to higher very high like the rocks and the clover but the Moss texture switches to a lower quality mipmap fattening them out a bit in comparison to high or very high honestly I'd say this is not a huge loss in quality for this shot going down to medium in a shot like this one though I would say we can see more variation we can see that the ground texture is basically the same throughout all presets here but the quality of the texture on this swing blight plant changes from very high to high there is a slight loss of precision in the base texture and one of the texture layers but you would honestly be searching for that to notice it on medium or low the difference in texture quality though is obvious even without a comparison I think you would just say oh that looks pretty low reses so medium can be fine in some views but it can be less fine for other views when looking at the PS5 at least in its 30fps quality mode setting I would say the texture detail on this blight plant is most similar to the very high setting albeit the output resolution is softening it since it is sub 4K here due to Dynamic resolution scaling all in all at a flat resolution using optimized settings in a scene like this one here you can save around 12% performance over Max settings while looking more or less identical on an RTX 2070 super at 1440p daa not exactly huge win but as I recommended in my last video the real win for optimized settings is using an upscaler like dlss with Dynamic resolution and you'll get incredible increases in performance over native resolution while having very little difference in the end visual quality while keeping frame rates up to your desired rate truly they use Dynamic res so heavily on console and for Mid to low speec gpus I wholeheartedly recommend using it as well it will be game-changing okay so that is it for optimized set but what about the steam deck can it be optimized for that thing well to say the least even though I was very excited by the prospect of seeing this game running on the steam deck I would say in the current version that is available I would highly advise against playing the game there even while running the game at the lowest possible settings in game and running the game at 720p trying to Target 30 FPS using Dynamic resolution I would say the game fell woefully short of that Target all throughout the attempted Play constantly honestly the visual quality on top of the performance was what I would consider unplayable essentially the game suffers from Big bouts of performance drops when doing anything that is slightly more taxing such as in this combat here yeah I'd say that is not good for control and it is also not good for visuals as Dynamic resolution is going quite low here another problem is that the lingering issues in the PC version will be Amplified on the steam deck in my last video I pointed out how the ryzen 53600 showcased a handful of stutters or frame time spikes when you Traverse the train they look like this a short spike to 66 milliseconds when walking across the terrain very noticeable and annoying I would say but it wasn't world or Game ending I would like to see them fixed but such traversals on the steam deck look like this a huge cascading performance drop with a stutter that eventually clears up the issue is that this happens all over the game world when you move around it and I feel like it takes away from the experience greatly another issue that I mentioned my last video was how cutscenes can have strange Ultra heavy GPU performance at random spots like here on the 3070 where the frame time nearly doubles suddenly while GPU limited as the camera swings out here on the steam deck that is even worse the game goes from being above 30 FPS and goes into the single digits in frame rate in such a moment so the current lingering issues with the game on PC are massively ampli ified on the steam deck to the point where basic presentation and gameplay kind of falls apart should those General issues with the PC version be fixed perhaps the knock on effect for steam deck will be immense but an important thing to remember about the PC version of horizon forbidden West is that is primarily using the assets for the game from the PlayStation 5 version and not the PS4 version those assets are generally not packed in the game that you can download Steam deck will do well with games that have PS4 quality assets usually but it will flounder in those games that have current generation Assets in them usually so maybe even after fixes this game could be a bridge too far for good performance on the steam [Music] deck beyond the steam deck there are two other areas that I did not touch in my last week video and that is image reconstruction and Intel Arc performance for image reconstruction looking between the three options available we can see the usual characteristics for each upscaler except for xcss which has a lot of issues in the current version of the game when using a non-intel GPU and the dp4 a version of xcss as you can see here in the middle the image is generally soft and any and all the particle effects have great smearing in and behind them like you can see with the insects flying about the camera here with an Intel Arc GPU the xmx version of xss is indeed Superior it is less blurry and the particles do not smear any longer but look at the clouds in the background they are now vibrating quite intensely this happens with many of the post-process effects as well so you'll see it in the depth of field that intense jittering here like you could see in the clouds you'll also see this happening with Dynamic resolution being switched as we can see here when comparing to dlss Dynamic resolution on the right on a 27 super and xss dynamic resolution on the left there on the Intel Arc a770 you can see a kind of full screen fizzling occurring when Dynamic resolution is changing on the left and that's not really apparent on the right with dlss furthermore if you look at the performance here you'll see that Intel Arc is not doing too well in this game even with Dynamic resolution on at the moment it would be interesting to see how much improvement can be done there on the driver side and with some game optimization the last aspect of reconstruction I want to talk about is dss3 frame generation now it works better than it did at launch as of the patch on March 28th but if you look at dlss 3 using standard vsync without g-sync the camera has some really obvious stuttering in it which makes dss3 unusable in this mode now this is not the standard way to use dss3 but it is a mode that it technically kind of supports and more importantly FSR 3 supports this mode and when it does arrive in future patches I would like to see frame generation working better with standard vsync but that is really all I have to say here about Horizon forbidden West Post launch on PC it's a generally great and Polished PC version it has just a few issues regarding frame time spikes that need to be cleaned up on Lower nend CPUs and it would be great to see some of that steam deck performance worked on anyway if you did like this video hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts a video support us on patreon to help us out write a comment below follow on Twitter and as always this is Alex spinning you farewell on

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 122,569

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Id: xTwEGy6HHKo

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024