What does Horizon: Forbidden West bring to the table on PC?

The Horizon saga is one that has established itself very strongly, despite its short life, in this entertainment medium. It’s hard not to know her. Whether it’s because of Guerrilla Games’ legacy in the industry, because of its curious theme, or because today’s Kojima would be nothing without the Amsterdam studio , there is a lot to be attracted to in the works of the European team. Now, its latest game, that Horizon : Forbidden West that polished the vast majority of errors from its first installment and that took the PS5 hardware to the extreme, comes to PC with everything ready to do the same with our systems. Of course, the open world of Aloy and company not only maintains the graphical pulse of one of the most visually beautiful and overwhelming action games in years, but Nixxes Software once again demonstrates that they are the best at what they do .

And yes, in the coming and going of studios associated with Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation, this development has fallen into the territory of the Dutch. Nixxes Software has been supporting development teams for a lifetime and, for two years, accompanying all the ports of ex-exclusives from PS5 to PC with skill and meticulous work behind them . Yes, reading Nixxes next to “new exclusive coming to PC” is synonymous with success, good work and a reliable team, and with Horizon: Forbidden West the Dutch achieve their fourth success with the most complicated port to master they have ever seen. made.

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Not everything is perfect, of course, and it is not exempt from the occasional problem in CPU consumption or visual bugs, but what the Dutch team achieves is outstanding. Of course, first of all know that I am going to focus only on the work done by Nixxes and therefore on the PC port that concerns us. The narrative, playable and mechanical aspects of Horizon: Forbidden West or Burning Shores , its DLC that arrived in the game last year 2023, are exclusively relegated to their pertinent analyses. With that said, let’s go West with Aloy, Nixxes and Guerrilla Games.

What does Horizon: Forbidden West bring to the table on PC?

As is usual in ports of Sony exclusives to PC, regardless of whether they are made by Nixxes or Iron Galaxy – although the latter have faced problems with the version of The Last of Us Part 1 on PC -, what we can expect is a tremendous job in covering all the needs of today’s PC gamer. With this in mind, Horizon: Forbidden West on PC arrives with full support for DLSS 3.0 , Frame Generation and, in the case of the red team, AMD’s FSR 2.2 . All of this accompanied by NVIDIA Reflex, support for the DualSense controller – with haptic vibration and some resistance in the triggers – and a fairly small number of visual adjustments, but I prefer it this way to the multitude of options in that Joel and Ellie adventure.

Captured on PC

In this case, if you have already played any of the Dutch team’s ports, you will know how they work with the original material. Like, for example, Spider-Man Miles Morales or Ratchet and Clank: A Dimension Apart , the work with Forbidden West is more about perfectionism than about leaving PS5 relegated to a secondary place. Of course, Guerrilla worked with its Decima Engine in order to take advantage of the current generation of PlayStation, so its jump to PC represents a mix of the best that the Japanese console offers, and fusing performance and visual quality in a complete product ; but at the same time close a circle of ports that began in 2020 with Zero Dawn, somewhat maligned for its poor performance .

A solid and equally demanding port, in equal parts

Nixxes does not advocate going overboard and adding improvements such as Ray Tracing , almost a must have for many current games and without it they do not seem to pass the “current generation game” requirement. The Dutch rescue the 2022 game and treat it with care, respecting what we enjoyed two years ago, and, at the end of the day, something that leads us to a crucial question: can Horizon Forbidden West surprise us graphically right now like in its premiere on PS5? Without a doubt, it is an experience that enters the eyes like few others and that shines with its own light on PC.

Water quality as well as sharpness on PC (right) is higher than on PS5 (left) in Quality Mode

In this sense, few faults can be put to the work behind the port. Horizon: Forbidden West looks and plays exceptionally well, but don’t get carried away by Nixxes’ resume: sacrifices have to be made. On a mid-range component system with an RTX 3060 Ti , i5 12400 , and 32GB of RAM —with the game installed on an M2 SSD and at 1440p resolution—DLSS is going to be your best friend. Running the game at the native resolution with a High visual quality is putting obstacles in an experience that seeks to make you pamper the option of graphical settings .

It is something that already happened to Nixxes with Miles Morales in 2022, and that is that with a good team, enjoyment is guaranteed. It sounds obvious, but nothing is infallible : with an RTX 3060 Ti, you have to rely on DLSS. With NVIDIA scaling in Quality and the settings varying from Medium to High —for hair I encourage you to place it in Medium or Low quality without fear of poor quality—, we can exceed 60 FPS , even reach 70, in areas playable and those where Forbidden West flexes its graphic muscle with ease. I would have liked to have more options in Ambient Occlusion and not “die” in SSAO, but you can’t have everything.

Lighting on PC (right) is better than PS5 (left), although volumetric fog appears more prominent on this one

Of course, not even that will free you from certain concessions . Small details such as the tessellation of surfaces and plants, or volumetric effects, without forgetting Aloy’s hair, with her red hair blowing in the wind, consume resources like few others, something that is noticeable in the cinematics. Although the game is dotted with in-game scenes with a fixed camera, the cinematics , where Forbidden West boasts short shots and with several characters in the same scene, are calamitous for our PC. We can easily talk about drops to 45 FPS in the worst moments.

Disabling Depth of Field helps gain some stability, but the game activates it by default in cutscenes, so it won’t be miraculous. In this regard, I would recommend keeping an eye on hair , level of detail , shadows or clouds , and reducing the quality to Medium to scratch FPS, but keep in mind that you are going to see crops below the standard of 60 images per second.

Captured on PC

If you want to reach them and not let go, Nixxes helps you. As on PS5, the Decima engine works well with dynamic resolution ; what saved the Japanese from going out burning after dinner, in more everyday terms. This means that although the general resolution will remain at 1440p in this case (it will depend on which one you have configured), the game allows you to dynamically scale certain individual rendering objectives to reduce the workload on the GPU based on the FPS objective that you set. we want to achieve. It’s a “problem”, or rather a license inherited from that console version , but it comes to save the day. For use, Nixxes adds an option in the Display Settings tab to select the FPS target, from 30 to 240 frames per second in groups of 15.

The dynamic resolution works really well in order to achieve a stable 60 FPS and even exceed it with ease. Furthermore, activating dynamic resolution does not prevent us from adjusting the sharpness of the game in the Graphics Settings section, which helps to achieve a cleaner image and save us the tedium of seeing certain elements of the screen a little more blurred than normal. Its visual impact is minimal , although it falls behind DLSS, obviously. In case you don’t like this option, reducing the DLSS to Balanced helps, although the dynamic resolution is halfway between Performance and Balanced.

Captured on PC

As for the speed of the game, something that Sony has taken advantage of to the point of boredom with an SSD designed to make the loading screens disappear, saying that with an M2, speed is guaranteed. Forbidden West makes a first load of shaders at the beginning of the first game you play – it also compiles shaders at certain moments of the adventure, which does not represent a noticeable sacrifice in performance, but we can see certain slowdowns -, and it will take us in around 40 seconds to complete. Once this is done, accessing a game takes just five to six seconds with this M2 Samsung 970 EVO Plus at 3,500 MB/s.

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Fast travel , meanwhile, is virtually instantaneous, lasting just two seconds between the most widely spaced points. I have the PS5 version, with which I have managed to make some comparisons, and it is true that at certain times, the Japanese console works a little faster, especially when you open the game or when you start a new game. Even so, the overall result on PC is superb.

Captured on PC

But what if I have a slightly better PC? I’ve also tested Horizon: Forbidden West on a laptop with a Ryzen 9 and an RTX 4070, and here Nixxes expects you to take advantage of DLSS 3.0. If you add Frame Generation to the above , leave aside the dynamic resolution and throw yourself headlong into DLSS 3 in Quality Mode, with graphic settings mainly in High – with the exception of hair and the level of detail – and you will enjoy a superior experience.

Recommendation to reach 60 FPS on a system with medium resources

I don’t usually do this with certain PC ports of games, but Nixxes has macerated an experience that has been improving with each work done, so I would like to give you a recommended configuration for a system with the aforementioned settings — an RTX 3060 Ti, 32 GB of RAM, i5 12400, 1440p screen and an M2 SSD. In addition, the visual adjustments are so concise that they make the task really easy.

RESOLUTION	Your native resolution
VSYNC	disabled
LOW LATENCY NVIDIA REFLEX	Yes | On + Boost
DYNAMIC RESOLUTION SCALING	If you want a stable 60 FPS experience or have an RTX 3060 or lower, activate it at 60
RESCALING METHOD (DISABLED IF YOU USE DYNAMIC RESOLUTION)	DLSS
RESCALING QUALITY (DISABLED IF YOU USE DYNAMIC RESOLUTION)	Quality or Balanced
FRAME GENERATION (ONLY IF YOU HAVE AN RTX 40)	Yeah
TEXTURES	High
TEXTURE FILTERING	x8
SHADOW QUALITY	Half
SCREEN SPACE SHADOWS	Yeah
AMBIENT OCCLUSION	SSAO
SCREEN SPACE REFLECTIONS	High or low, I haven’t seen much change between the two
LEVEL OF DETAIL	Half
HAIR QUALITY	Medium | Low
QUALITY OF THE CROWDS	Half
GROUND QUALITY	High
WATER QUALITY	High
CLOUDS QUALITY	Half
TRANSLUCITY	Predetermined
OCCLUSION MAPPING	Yeah
DEPTH OF FIELD	No

Settings not mentioned such as Field of Vision are up to you, although this option consumes resources if you set it to high

As you can see, in purely graphic terms, a mid-range system can cope with the game with a quality halfway to the mix of PS5 Fidelity Mode and Performance Mode. Even with that in mind, the overall quality, as well as the overall resolution of the textures, is higher than its same PlayStation version.

Consumption , finally, is what anyone could expect from a visual marvel like this . We are talking about an average of between 13 and 15 GB of RAM for the aforementioned configuration, with a consumption of 95% of the graphics card and a use of 55% of the processor . In this regard, I cannot say whether the Nixxes port undervalues ​​the CPU because consumption is variable, but perhaps it can be solved in a future patch.

The fourth success in a row

Horizon: Forbidden West

By: Alberto Lloria

I like how Nixxes works. The European team has made a name for itself within the industry as a studio capable of working well even with a tough nut to crack like this Horizon: Forbidden West, and the result is what it is: remarkable. Guerrilla Games’ open world looks phenomenal as it already did on PS5, but being able to play it on PC means fusing the best of visual quality with superior performance to achieve the definitive game experience. Of course, even though Nixxes pampers the mid-ranges, aspects inherited from the Decima Engine on PS5 such as Dynamic Resolution mean that certain concessions have to be made and do without native resolutions. Even so, Nixxes executes his fourth goal for the squad with a PC port at the height of the saga, a PS5 exclusive and from the studio itself.

Buy Horizon: Forbidden West

5 things you should know:

1. It is the most demanding port that Nixxes has worked on, and it shows.
2. You need a good system to get the most out of native resolutions.
3. The dynamic resolution, inherited from PS5, works perfectly for mid-range PCs to achieve the desired 60 FPS.
4. Loading times, as on PS5, are minimal.
5. There are some visual errors, but the experience is round.