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The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/Rytoxz on 2024-03-22 01:14:15.
It has been almost four years since Sony started porting their big PlayStation games to PC – starting with Horizon Zero Dawn, and nothing shows just how far we’ve come in that time than today’s release of Horizon Forbidden West. Here are the PC related things it gets spot on:
- The game released simultaneously on both Steam and Epic Games and was available to buy from legitimate key resellers with publisher-provided keys. The developers also communicated exact launch timing (and launch was a reasonable time), and allowed pre-load days before launch.
- The game supports achievements on both Steam and Epic Games, and the achievements are progressive meaning you can view exactly how much progress you have to completing the achievement.
- The developers worked with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel to get game-ready drivers available before launch, and highlighted respectable system requirements that showed average fps.
- Backed up by Digital Foundry, the game runs extremely well and scales beyond the original PS5 release in graphics. I’ve personally played for about six hours so far, and in that time I haven’t had a single stutter, and the game has been running completely smooth with max settings. The game has a shader pre-compilation step which helps here.
- Supports almost all major upscaling technologies like DLSS3 (upscaling and frame generation with NVIDIA Reflex), FSR2 upscaling (FSR3 frame generation is coming post-launch), and XeSS upscaling. For all of these, the latest DLL file versions are present. The game also has dynamic render scaling which works with these upscalers to dynamically change their resolution values to hit an fps target. For those that care, you can disable TAA.
- The game has modern APIs like DirectStorage for fast loading via NVMe SSDs, supports HDR, and there is a launcher to modify graphics settings before launch – which can then be disabled for future launches.
- The game’s menus work perfectly with keyboard and mouse or controller, and there are button prompts for Xbox and PlayStation inputs. The game supports 4K UI scaling, DualSense haptics, and has many available options for accessibility.
- The graphics menu allows changes in real-time without a game restart, and you can see the effect of those changes as you modify them. You can also disable unwanted visual effects like motion blur, vignette, and chromatic aberration, and you can adjust FOV.
Realistically the only stretch goals that would have been nice would be the addition of ray tracing, but given the original game didn't support it, the effort to add these features to the engine would likely have been too large.
Some of these may sound like the bare minimum, but in the current age of PC ports, almost nobody gets all these things right. I think applause has to be given to the effort Nixxes have made here, and I am certainly very hopeful for all their future releases on PC (like Ghost of Tsushima).
