If you thought that Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition would be your run-of-the-mill PC port, think again. According to an analysis by DSFix mod author Peter “Durante” Thoman, the performance of Guerrilla Games’s open-world action RPG can vary greatly depending on the amount of processor cores and threads that’s available. Just take a look at the benchmark below.
As we can see, Horizon Zero Dawn scales incredibly well and makes full use of today’s higher core counts. An 8C/16T processor will deliver an average frame rate of 149 FPS, but stepping down to a 4C/8T processor results in a 35 percent decrease (104.6 FPS).
“While full cores without hyperthreading are relatively effective at keeping up the average FPS, when going below 8 hardware threads – regardless of whether these are full cores or just threads – the percentile metrics drop off immediately and heavily,” Thoman points out.
What’s also interesting is that Horizon Zero Dawn performs substantially better on PCIe 3.0 16x vs. PCIe 3.0 8x. Differences in PCI Express bandwidth are generally negligible in other titles, but in Guerrilla’s port, Thoman found differences of up to 20 percent at 4K.