One of the most technologically-advanced games on PlayStation 5 is coming imminently to PC. Horizon Forbidden West is acclaimed for its beautiful rendering and smooth performance on PS5, and we were fascinated to see how porting specialists Nixxes have adapted it to PC – and to see how accurate its (entirely reasonable) recommended specs are in-game. The studio continues to work on and refine the game up until launch, but we have had around a week with preview builds and can offer our initial impressions.
In preparing this piece, I did have time to speak with Guerrilla Games and Nixxes (and we’ll be publishing an interview soon), where I was intrigued to learn that the studios are aiming for a ‘console-like experience’ in terms of ease-of-use and snappiness, while retaining the ability to tweak the game to your liking. And that’s my first takeaway: the basics are done right. The user interface is logical and functional and changes to graphics settings are shown in real-time, allowing you to see the difference as you tweak – and come to your own conclusions about the quality increases versus the performance hits for more advanced features. Similar to other Nixxes projects, there’s a wealth of upscaling options available and anti-aliasing options that include SMAA or no AA at all for the temporal anti-aliasing sceptics.
As usual, Nixxes does its best to accommodate the most popular PC options, including ultrawide support – and a 21:9 aspect ratio is a great fit for Horizon’s expansive vistas. The ability to turn off letterboxing during cutscenes is also impressive. Elsewhere, there’s also a snappiness in terms of loading times too, where a high-end PC with a fast NVMe drive running at PS5-equivalent settings is comparable with the rapid experience on console. This is aided by DirectStorage, though GPU decompression isn’t enabled. At present, the developers feel this feature is too restrictive in terms of mixing and matching decompression formats and isn’t quite the finished article. We’re told that as Horizon isn’t heavily CPU-limited, it makes sense to run decompression on the CPU rather than adding additional burden to the GPU.
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