Horizon Forbidden West PC vs PS5: Enhanced Features, Performance Tests + Image Quality Boosts!

digital Foundry is proudly sponsored by msi's new range of Next Generation QD OLED gaming monitors available in two sizes 32in 4K 240 HZ and 27in 1440p 360 HZ these are some of the best monitors we've ever tested with Incredible motion Clarity 1,000 nit HDR highlights OLED burning protection AI features and genuinely gamechanging performance check the video description below to learn more and for UK viewers enter to win an MSI MPG 271 qrx 360 HZ QD [Music] OLED with Horizon forbidden West coming to PC I was curious to see how it would Faire and look in comparison to the console version and I was accordingly excited when Guerilla games and nixes offered us a preview before release to see what they've been up to so in today's video covering that preview before Horizon's launch here on March 21st I will look into the areas where the PC version improves over the console version I'll look at the user experience and I will shortly detail the performance I could measure in the preview to give you a good expectation of how the game will run on your PC come release but before I get into that I want to talk about the technical user experience based on my time with the preview in preparing for this video I interviewed Engineers programmers and artists at both Guerilla games and Nixie who is the developing porting House of this PC version there I found out that a console like experience in terms of ease of use and snappiness was something that they were targeting and I can report that this is what you're getting with the PC version and even more the in-game UI and user experience are Pinnacles on the PC platform when the game starts and you go into the options you are confronted with a UI that actually works and works well with a mouse and keyboard and controller using both individually or at the same time this is in stark contrast to a lot of games I test at DF that often lack simple intuitive controls and menus I'm looking at you Capcom so the menus work well and like other Nixie ports you can control and change all options for graphics in real time time in the game playay and see their effect right in front of you this allows players to easily know what settings do and what performance difference they can expect and this elevates any PC version like other Nixie games they also have a wealth of upscaling options and a lot of anti- eling types including no AA or SMA so if you don't like TAA you have some Alternatives here though I will say I heavily recommend using TAA as even though it might make the game a little bit softer at 1080P or 4 1440p it will clear up obvious flicker that you would otherwise see without it one of my personal favorite options here in this PC Port is the support for Ultra wide aspect ratio presentations and monitors I don't own an ultra wide monitor but that did not stop me from being able to use that aspect ratio on my lgc1 OLED and as you can see with the footage on screen aspect ratios like 21 by9 here are extremely appropriate for this game's visual presentation you can quite literally see more of the horizon in Horizon and that extra field of view at the screen edges makes the game World seem much more expansive and should you turn off the option to force letter boxing in the cut scenes you can also enjoy the cut scenes in the game in ultrawide which makes them much more cinematic than they already are like other Nix games they did have to manually go in here and make sure there are not too many distracting issues in the expanded areas of the left and right during cutcenes and I would say that reflects what I saw in my time with the game but I cannot test everything here so perhaps some cutscenes look less natural but generally the user experience in the port is great and the options are top tier Nixie standard alongside the interface being Snappy getting in and out of the game is also Snappy on a high-end PC with a good nvme loading speeds from the menu after having already started a game are in the realm of 6 seconds that's just outpacing the PlayStation 5 version of the game a reason for this speed is because the PC version leverages the direct storage API but importantly unlike Ratchet and Clank it is not using GPU de compression asking the developers as to why they said that the GPU decompression API at the moment is too restrictive as to how you can mix and match decompression formats they also said that GPU decompression at the moment can cause scheduling issues in the driver that they cannot account for either way any of the frame time issues that we saw with GPU direct storage in Ratchet and Clank are just not there in Forbidden West and the game is better for it speaking of frame times the first time you start the game on PC you are greeted with a short Shader pre-compilation step which will be of differing length depending upon your CPU it can be anywhere from 28 seconds on the 7800 x3d up to over a minute on the ryzen 53600 this pre-compilation step is compiling compute shaders that are used for the procedural placement of vegetation in the game world when in game though the game is also pre-compiling shaders all the time in the background on extra CPU threads for things like material this is similar to the system seen in other Nixie ports and I can report that so far I haven't seen any Shader compilation stutter on any of my machines but I don't want to rule it out 100% as they technically use a manual grabbing process to get all the shaders they need for this game so perhaps there are some missed in this extremely large open world here and potentially if your CPU is too slow it could get behind on the list of shaders that need compiling in the background and it can cause a stutter but generally I didn't see any and I think you should expect to not see any if you have a modern CPU to summarize the game in the preview showcases a good UI and a great smooth user experience in performance but more on that later towards the end of this video so what upgrades does the game offer above the PlayStation 5 experience unlike Ratchet and Clank or Spider-Man which offered extra rate tracing settings above the PlayStation 5 version Horizon forbidden West comparatively has more conservative upgrades to graphical quality that tend to just focus Fus on increasing sampling counts an example of this is anisotropic filtering PS5 runs a variable AF that often is just around 4X on PC you can Pump It Up to 16x and see much better texture quality at a distance another upgrade can be found in level of detail and terrain quality where the PC versions vary High settings for those settings add extra underbrush and level geometry at a distance not found on PlayStation 5 but beyond those two things other upgrades are less obvious as an example you can unlock full quality depth of field for gameplay which is only used for cinematics on PlayStation 5 in practice though this is pretty minor and you will be squinting to see the difference here in this comparison between that 30fps mode on PlayStation 5 and the very highest quality setting there on PC so the settings upgrades are nice but beyond anistropic filtering and LOD I would say they are small the biggest upgrade visually over the PlayStation 5 tends to be in effective resolution and anti-aliasing especially versus the performance mode on PlayStation 5 there the util ization of checkerboard rendering plus Dynamic resolution leads to a soft image resolve 1800p for example with daa is much Superior offering greater detail a crisper image and much better anti-aliasing with less flicker that softness is so profound on the PlayStation 5 version that even dlss in 1800p performance mode looks genuinely Superior than what you can find on the PlayStation 5 even at 1440p with daa I think you're looking at a superior image in that PC version here and DSS next to that PlayStation 5 resolve yeah that doesn't look too bad even at 1440p basically you don't need a super huge GPU to get good image quality in this game next to the PlayStation 5 version this is especially true if you use the dynamic resolution system here take for example the RTX 3070 targeting 1800p with dlss I would say every single aspect of the image on the right here is far superior to the PlayStation 5 image on the left better anti-aliasing Clarity and detail even an RTX 2070 super running dlss at 60fps at 1440p is producing results that are comparable my co-workers in a blind test had a hard time saying which image they preferred they pointed out better anti-aliasing and less flicker in the right image at the cost of some clarity in comparison to the PlayStation 5 image the basic point though is that you can get good image quality on the cheap here in this port but that's really it for the upgrades now it's time to talk talk about performance I haven't had the time to make optimized settings for launch for this video and that should be coming in future content but I did have the time to test the game on a variety of Hardware to get a sense of how it scales I have some useful information there and some tips firstly the specs that nix's put out are accurate but with a small caveat take the RTX 3070 at high settings which according to the spec sheet should be 1440 p60 if you load up the game at a flat 1440 ptaa High the RTX 3070 in that opening area of the game will be actually below 60 FPS in the mid-50s to Upper 50s at times that is a great perceptual 60fps and would be good for vrr but it is definitely not a flat 60fps and the opening area of this game by the way is actually rather representative of the GPU load you will see in other areas the reason why the RTX 370 here is below 60 is because the game actually defaults to Dynamic resolution scaling on and that is what the specs were written out for if you turn on DRS guess what areas like this one will be at 60 FPS on the RTX 3070 DRS is very important to this game's performance the console versions use it all the time and all of their modes to hit the frame rate targets and you honestly should be using it on PC2 especially with the use of smart upscaler like dlss FSR 2 or xss where there the dynamic resolution scales all the way down to the performance mode of the internal resolution and all the way up to fullon Native res so 1440p dlss for example with DRS on will scale all the way down to 720p potentially and all the way up to Native 1440p it changes the res in apparently small increments and will tend to keep your GPU fully pegged at 100% utilization at least from the user perspective and in practice it does a good job of keeping performance up for this video I tried out 1800p dlss DRS with high settings on the RTX 3070 and it was basically a great 60fps I also tried out 1440p dlss DRS with the 2070 super and that was was a generally good 60fps but I did see it could drop frame rates at times due to GPU utilization an example of that would be this Cuts scene here which saw drops into the 50s Not Seen elsewhere I also found an area or two in the open world which could drop the GPU into the 50s once again due to GPU load this is perfectly viable on a vrr display but I would say you need a 2080 or a 2080 super to get a perfectly locked 60fps here at these settings as you may have noticed I'm showing a third 370 and a 2070 super on purpose 8 GB gpus are a controversial point with these Nixie ports as they contend to have issues at higher resolutions in this game I found out that the 3070 and 2070 super did not have any issues with a vram running out at 1440p but at 1800p and specifically on the RTX 3070 I saw at a couple moments after a cut scene played or during a cut scene playing or after fast traveling that the game could overuse the amount of vram possible and it would dip into system memory in such moments the frame rate goes down extremely hard and the game starts to run really poorly in moments like this I saw a total usage of vram for Windows and the game of around 7.6 GB or so given this Behavior I would say only play the game at 1440p unless you're willing to drop texture quality instead of degrading some texture quality on said GP use the game's dipping into system memory at the moment which really is going to destroy the performance of the GPU even if it technically has enough shading power to take care of it it is a bit of a downer but these 8 GB gpus should at least be fine at 1440p or if you drop down the texture quality to medium coming over to CPU performance there are two things to report here and they're all about the lower end experience on the ryzen 53600 here generally in the game world and nearly all the cutscenes that CPU is CPU Limited above 60 FPS with very good frame times so this older lower end CPU can get a great 60 FPS in this game most of the time I say most of the time because I did interestingly find out that there are certain moments such as in large combat encounters where more enemies could cause the rise and 53600 to dip below 60 FPS into the upper 50s this is very reasonable given the CPU in question but I was actually very impressed when this was happening usually when CPU limited and there is a lot happening on screen game engine become much more wild in the frame times that they're producing they start to stutter more when you subject them to torture like this here in Horizon forbidden West though even when CPU limited and even at the heaviest CPU moments the frame times are normal looking and they are similar to one another which leads to relatively straight lines on the frame time graph and subjectively that means when you're CPU limit in this game it leads to surprisingly smooth performance and this is something you definitely do not see in other games I don't know what they did here but Bravo nixes and gorilla so 99% of the time the frame times were very good on the CPU but I did manage to record two or three moments in the game where I saw a frame time Spike occurring leading to a visible stutter both occurred in the intro to the game and I'm not exactly sure what caused them but they were visible I mentioned this Behavior to Nixie so maybe there are some changes on the way speaking of changes there are some things I would like to see added to this game in patches based upon my preview as of right now there is no FSR 3 frame generation nix's mentioned it to me though so I assume it is coming but I'm not sure if it's going to be there for launch likewise I would like to see slightly more Dynamic resolution control perhaps the ability to control which resolutions it tops out at or bottoms out at or perhaps a more fine grain Target for FPS above and below the refresh rate lastly I would like to see some smaller tweaks to some odd behavior I saw here or there for example this log in the intro this is totally minor but the texture didn't seem to load right on PC no matter matter what and it just kind of looked low reses perhaps there's other examples of this out in the open world or for example I noticed some odd frame time increases in the game's opening cutscene this depressed frame rates in a strange way that disappeared shortly I'm not sure what caused it but I also told Nixie is about it and lastly I did notice that the opening cutscene to the game that is a pre-rendered video sequence that explains what happened in the last game doesn't run as smooth as it does on PlayStation 5 it doesn't Target a completely flat 30 FPS and has wobbly frame times leading to poor playback all these things aren't very important for the gameplay experience but I did notice them and perhaps they will be fixed at launch or shortly thereafter with that being said I think that is enough for this preview video Horizon forbidden West in the pre-launch state I played it in has a lot going for it and it looks to be a very good port with a lot of customization and PC extras most importantly from my perspective though it was a very smooth running game without the issues I noticed in the Spider-Man PC or ratcheting Clank I think that that smooth performance will convince most people to play this game on PC especially if they use that Dynamic resolution scaling option but that is Enough from me for now 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 on the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts a video support us on patreon to enable more work like this in the future and as always this is Alex you

Channel: Digital Foundry

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Id: AUWNpOHi3kA

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024