Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 60fps Patch: Nigh-On Perfect Performance

horizon zero dawn has had a patched release for it last thursday during the end of gamescom which unlocks the game's frame rate up to 60 fps on playstation 5 through backwards compatibility mode to talk about the ins and outs of this simple patch here i'm joined by john lennon how are you in there john i'm doing very well alex and of course i'm actually here less to discuss it with you and more ask you questions about it because i haven't actually tried it myself so i'm kind of curious you're the one doing the heavy lifting on this project so we thank you for that yeah of course um the reason why i'm taking over this project because john's doing other things but also because i had an experience last year with the pc version through multiple videos where we found out very quickly unlocking horizon zero dawn up to 60 fps was not the easiest thing on earth because the game was designed primarily around 30 fps initially on the playstation 4. so it requires actually quite a bit of engineering effort to get the game running at a nice 60 fps both in terms of performance to a certain degree as well as in terms of i would just say uh i don't know how good it looks at 60. there's a lot of things that get in the way but uh all right well let's start with this then so basically before we get into some of the details like what's the basics here like what does this patch actually do it's pretty simple john on playstation 5 it unlocks the frame rate up to 60 fps uh it's using backwards compatibility mode so with all the limitations that that has in terms of how it can change the game uh it eliminates the resolution and performance mode options that the playstation 4 pro version had and just essentially runs the game in the entire time in that resolution mode which was checkerboard 4k back then and checkerboard 4k now okay so it's basically like a lot of the other patches we've seen where it's basically just bumping the frame rate up but as you said it's exactly there's most likely more challenges behind this one due to the nature of it on pc uh so i guess the big question people are going to want to know then is how does it actually perform does it really get just does it actually get to 60 stable or what's going on oh you know it's having such a hard time of course not no it's running magnificently this game i mean if you just think about what the playstation 4 pro is in comparison to the ps5 gpu even if it's slightly um limited by backwards compatibility mode we know that the playstation 5 gpu can just run circles around the ps4 pro one definitely more than two times as powerful and that shows out in the performance footage where i did the intro section as well as running through the open world and meridian try and find spots and areas where i knew the original playstation 4 and playstation 4 pro version had issues and i essentially found no issues however many thousands of frames that are that were recorded i only saw one actual drop it's in the initial scene so like in the first uh three or four minutes of the game essentially it's an area where i knew on pc where it's pretty hard on the gpu uh it's also an area where the playstation 4 pro dips into like the low 20s so it's like slightly dips in the 50 fps for this one moment but then the rest of the entire play all the rest of the cutscenes i recorded all perfect flawless 60 fps technically you mean i mean that one cutscene does show maybe there's chance for other drops throughout the entire you know there's a variety of gameplay experiences you can play here that it did not have um but you know maybe there's a chance for that but it's so low that i didn't record it and it's probably not important to even you know talk about if it does show up so pretty basic then so it does it basically does what it says on the tin which is yeah it does exactly um but what about some of the other issues that we like when you looked at the pc version there was some things that you kind of noticed especially running at higher frame rates what's the situation there so i'd say this is kind of the area where it's most like the pc version is now i'm presuming they uh you know did a lot of the code changes from that pc version and brought them on to the playstation 5 version for this patch so a lot of the issues that this game had at launch on pc regarding how 60 fps animations looked and things like that i'd say most of those are gone but at the same time it still has some of the the weird stuff that the game just inherently has because it wasn't designed around 60 fps so like between camera cuts you can definitely see some weird stuff happening like just like floating things or i mean it always had that though like even on yeah it it always has that you know there's just weird stuff like that there's one area though where i thought um there's an area where the pc version had a patch that got rid of alloy flying in one cutscene but curiously it's still in the playstation 5 version maybe that's just a tiny oversight wait so you can't fly anymore you can't fly anymore but yeah that's that's about it another thing i noticed too is that the playstation 5 version has uh you won't see it in the footage i'm presenting to you right here because i've tried to line up the footage so it looks good on youtube but the playstation 5 version uses a different cutscene transition timing than both pc and ps4 pro so the playstation 5 version will always end a cutscene a few frames earlier than the playstation 4 pro or ps i think that's most interesting for anybody that edits youtube videos because what that means is normally if you have two cutscenes from two different versions you put them side by side they usually just line right up uh but because of the timing here it just means that when the camera cuts on one version it cuts at a slightly different time than the other version which it doesn't matter to the end user you don't really see any difference it's just for actually editing it's a little bit annoying but okay whatever is this actually i'd love to know the reason behind that but there's really no no reason to or there's really no way it looks better for some reason i'm just i'm just surprised like that it was adjusted at all but okay okay so it's 60 fps it looks the same what about is there any other bonuses like for instance uh loading because i if i recall ps4 pro is like upwards of a minute or something to start so what about ps5 yeah loading up the game uh a cold boot new campaign about one minute on playstation 4 pro on ps5 it's cut in half which i think is good because uh we've seen sometimes backwards compatibility titles not even helping voting sometimes like you know it doesn't really do much of anything so you get a nice uh decrease in loading times by half or so on playstation five it's not as high as it could go because we're obviously limited by bc here the big test will be horizon two i think where yeah we'll actually compare the last gen and the current gen and see what it loads that one i imagine will have like two second loading times if anything at all uh to you know fit in with the the theme of what playstation 5 is another cool loading thing is that uh on playstation 4 and playstation 4 pro when you run around meridian or just any of the really dense areas of the game and you'd move quickly you'd have this issue where textures and objects that were being streamed in would come in but they'd come in late always so you could run up to an object and you'd see the texture like flash in like half a second later or run up to an object and see the object just fade into the scene a half a second later that was an issue that happened on those uh machines but playstation 5 i'm presuming due to backwards compatibility having some access to that ssd speed well it just doesn't have any of that right so it's pretty great and uh the last thing i think this is a little hard to show on youtube but i think the higher frame rate uh in general doubling it over playstation 4 and playstation 4 pro helps the checkerboard rendering that the game uses to look a little bit more competent uh it it is essentially like this you know the frames are closer together so i think checkerboard rendering here looks better and if you like zoom into i don't know wait wait did you just zoom in i just zoomed in oh no 400 oh no oh no gotta think of those phone screens man gotta think of those uh yeah so it does look better i think too even though it's just marginal well i mean it makes it makes sense logically i mean for people that are trying to grasp what you're talking about i mean think of an object like an arm moving across the screen at 60 frames per second if you look at each frame the arm will move less with each frame because there's more frames right if you move 30 it moves a larger distance and because the way the image reconstruction works and this is honestly true with many different anti-aliasing solutions with use previous frame data just having more frames closer together means better end results because it's just more info to build the frame from so for sure you want that higher frame rate it looks better it looks better it's less blurry and a bit sharper so that's nice um yeah that's that's all right all right all right so are there any actual issues then no there's no real issues with it okay it's the same game you played on playstation 4 pro back then now running at a higher frame rate with you know uh lower load times and slightly better image quality which is the only issue and that's a weird thing to say the only issue is that uh there wasn't more time invested in this patch to you know add in some smaller things sure like the game's anastropic filtering is still just like the playstation 4 pro version so it's not very good uh in that aspect or like the lod range is you know limited by that exact same thing we saw in the playstation 4 pro version so it's uh it's pretty low it's pretty aggressive uh but you know in in the end i think when you're playing this if you're going back to play it again or you're new to horizon zero dawn this is an excellent upgrade uh a simple one at that but but a good one uh and it's uh nice to see always these playstation 5 patches come out yeah exactly sort of a breathing new life into an old game which is you know that's kind of what this generation of backwards compatibility offers i mean stuff like fps boost on the xbox and then bespoke patches for ps5 uh this is great stuff and i'm glad to see that we're seeing it this time around yeah i'm too well john i think that's essentially all we can really say about this rather simple patch awesome 60 fps nice little upgrade uh yeah but that's about it so thank you so much for joining us yeah i'm happy to join you for this and be curious to see you horizon 2 i guess do we know if that's coming to the pc oh i don't know yet maybe we'll find out in a few years okay yeah exactly um so yeah if you did like this video please hit that like button to subscribe to the channel if you did find it informative well please look in that little corner there and hit that little bell button which will give you instant notifications when digital foundry posted video if you want to help us out and see more videos like this well support us on patreon to get years worth of our content and high quality download and if you want to talk to john or myself about this well you can always write to us on twitter and this is going to be alex saying auf wiedersehen and

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 268,857

Rating: 4.9148026 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: I3Xi8TMUuYk

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/enoughbutter]

Holy shit the music at the beginning sent shivers down my spine.

[u/FireflyNitro]

Damn, this looks gorgeous in 60fps. Maybe I need to replay it.

[u/Ehrand]

I like that they made fun of the zoom lol

[u/rickjamesia]

Knew I was right to procrastinate. Time to start it this weekend

Edit: Waiting for the weekend proved too hard. This game feels like it works 200% better than the few minutes I tried of my friend’s copy when it was new.

[u/SupahBlue]

Horizon, Ghosts, God Of War, The Last Of Us II... Sony really had a killer last gen and now they run at 60fps locked.

[u/WickieWillem]

Can’t wait to dive into this again, might just wait until like a month before Forbidden West though and just play them back to back

[u/JohnBraulio]

I am so happy I waited to play this for the first time. It’s been an absolute blast so far and the game is gorgeous at 60 fps

[u/majidalikhn]

that "Auf wiedersehen und ja" in the end was hilarious.

[u/[deleted]]

Started my replay yesterday, loving it.

What is amazing for me personally is that I am still gushing over how good this game looks. I mean sure, if I move closer and cherry pick I will see that it is not true 4K but it looks amazing in motion. Same with God of War.

Native 4K with latest effects and full on textures is just too taxing - dynamic scaling is where it's at.