Guerrilla Games has answered the call of Horizon Zero Dawn fans who have been desiring a higher level of performance out of the PC port of the hit post-apocalyptic adventure game.
As detailed in a post on the official subreddit today, Horizon Zero Dawn has received a new update that adds NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution to the game, allowing those on weaker hardware to enjoy the title at higher resolutions and/or settings with higher frame rates. Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC port originally shipped with AMD’s FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) for improved visuals, but that has been dropped due to the implementation of red team’s newer and arguably superior spatial upscaling technique.
The patch notes, per Guerrilla’s post on r/horizon:
Graphical Improvements
- Added Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology.
- Added AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, replacing FidelityFX CAS.
UI Changes
- Adjusted settings screen to facilitate the addition of DLSS and FSR.
- Render Scale option has been removed but same result can now be accomplished by adjusting setting Upscale Method to Simple and adjusting Upscale Quality.
Performance Improvements
- Improvement to the shader management system. This will result in a few noticeable differences:
- There is no longer a shader pre-compilation step on startup. The game will always compile shaders during loading and in the background.
- Stutters during gameplay that used to occur due to background shader compilation have now been significantly reduced.
- Because shader compilation is still happening in the background you may notice the game having a higher CPU utilization while that is happening.
- Loading screens will wait for the required shaders to be fully compiled. This may cause loading screens to take somewhat longer on certain systems.
- On higher spec machines with faster CPUs the loading screens will typically be shorter, due to more efficient shader compilation that better leverages high-end CPUs.
Horizon Zero Dawn’s highly anticipated sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, will be released on February 18, 2022, for PlayStation 5 consoles. There doesn’t seem to be any indication as to when the inevitable PC port might become available.
Source: r/horizon