Horizon Zero Dawn

Ah that's interesting, clears that up.

Also through a post from ResetEra it looks like Virtuous was indeed handling the PC port for the game.


Although the bigger factor is likely how much time they were allotted and how much money they had plus the number of people actively involved in the porting process and testing and all that.
It doesn't sound like it was a super quick or rushed port process but it does look like it needed more time to clear some of these issues or at least improving on some of them and other bugs and issues reported both in the early reviews and from users now that it's unlocked and playable for all.

 

so in terms of game-play is it more like Monster Hunter ?
or like Tomb Raider ? i didn't follow this one closely but i understand it was a killer
title on the PS.

 

It's not present in PC version
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/horizon-zero-dawn-pc-no-snow-deformation-ps4-aloy-hair-bug/

 

Somewhere in between those two if you categorize it like that.
Starting out game does feel similar to newer open world Tomb Raider's but there are lot of differences too.

Try it!

Yeah seems to be lot of variation, some have issues while others don't.
Of course I also have broken AF and occasional flickering reported with NV cards, flickering being very rare though.

I'd still like to point out I'm running the game at 1080p with High preset - except Textures Ultra, Reflections Medium - without using ingame vsync or fps limit.
Adaptive resolution is disabled. Resolution scale at 100 %.

If I changed even one of those, use higher preset, higher res. or enable vsync or cap, I'd likely run into issues.
Tried using ingame fps cap and it did introduce micro stutters.

Obviously increasing res. drops performance always as it should but from what I've seen and read the game seems to perform "better" in 1080p than it does in 1440p let alone 2160p, respectively.

Also HZD seems to be one of those games based on DF video where Ultra quality drops performance by quite a bit without making that much difference in image quality.

Using latest NV hotfix driver and W10 2004 with latest CU preview update, don't remember build number.
FWIW Hardware accelerated GPU scheduling off.

Recently clean installed Windows.

Running OS and game from NVME SSD (initial shader compilation took about 8 ... 9 minutes).

 

is it breaking any immersion? or it s ok?

 

nothing like Monster Hunter deep battle system but a lot simpler straight forward version of it , lots of Batman Arkham games detective style + some TR climbing mechanics

 

Played about 15 hours of this game so far plus a 2-3 hours of the PS4 Pro version in glorious checkerboarded 4K HDR on my LG B9 OLED for comparison.

Only one crash so far - my PC froze and restarted - but otherwise the game has been running stable, although I did leave the game running while I watched Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back in 4K on Saturday only to see it using almost 16 GB of RAM just from having Aloy idling near a campfire! I think it is safe to say this game has a memory leak, which might be why others have having crashes, as normally memory usuage is beteen 11.5 and 13 GB according to the RTSS overlay. Still high for a console port that runs on a system with 8 GB of system *and* graphics memory but the game runs okay with only the odd rare hitch.

I've settled on a framerate cap of 40 fps at 1440p using the Ultimate Quality preset, mainly because while the game mostly runs between 52 and 57 fps, it can dip to 38 fps which even with G-SYNC can feel jarring even though the game is running smoothly otherwise. It's more about how it feels. A 99.99% locked 40 fps feels smoother than a variable framerate and actually feels slightly smoother than the PS4 Pro version (30 fps vs. 40 fps!).

While I love the game itself and think it still looks very nice graphically (facial closeups are very good even if the dialogue cutscenes are mostly static and unimaginatively framed), I do think the PC version looks a bit rough. The draw distance is supposedly longer than the PS4 version but there are still jarring moments when the scenery in front of Aloy can just "pop in" while she runs forward, especially the grass. I think most of the texture flickering has now gone though as I set the NVIDIA Horizon Zero Dawn to Application-controlled for AF instead of forcing 16x. There still the odd flash of "something" but I suspect this might be the bug listed for the game in the NVIDIA driver notes even though I am not forcing any kind of image sharpening.

Just finished my first Cauldron this morning at level 23.

Hopefully, most of the issues will be resolved before I finish the game! That's the only problem with buying a game a launch that is not in a polished state on PC as you can often have finished it by the time the first patch arrives!

 

You could track a machine, now you can't because there is no snow deformation

 

Well at least the mechanized giraffes should be easy enough to spot. Should see about jumping into this once I'm done with Borderlands 3 for the current backlog project.
Game itself sounds like it's really good, just that it remains to be seen what the first or second patches address and the plan for the PC version after a few months. Move on or fix more.


EDIT: Hmm there's some comic tie in.



How do you eat robot chicken?

 

The pc is a mess for playing AAA games the vast majority of the time.

 

You bake them in the oven until the solders soften up.

- edit: snow deformation works as shown below by @anxious_f0x -

Btw according to PC Gamer's performance article (which is near useless in itself) the game actually adopted DX12 Ultimate.
Obviously ray-tracing isn't used but whether and to what extent other features like mesh-shaders are used remains to be confirmed.

EDIT: here:

https://www.pcgamer.com/horizon-zero-dawn-pc-performance-benchmarks/

 

Not really, no.

Except, it does work, in specific areas, like it did on PS4...

 

Perhaps it does work only for specific cards? I saw a video where it does not show anything in snow.

 

Not sure then, guess I just got lucky.

 

The snow deformation was a feature of the DLC "Frozen Wilds". Not implemented in the base game.

So only works if you are playing the DLC content.

 

Hopefully just a tessellation issue and not tied to framerate or something, probably would have to compare AMD and NVIDIA finding a known place in the Frozen Wilds area where it's meant to work unless something else is going on with it.

EDIT: Actually maybe that is the issue and there's testing back and forth from areas in the base game and the DLC so now there are multiple videos making it look like it is working on some systems and is broken on others for this PC version when it's only implemented for the DLC as I was told earlier in this topic, no backporting of the feature to the rest of the game.


EDIT: Probably a different type of snow model and associated shaders not just something that could add to replace the I guess more shallow snow in the original game and it's assets for this biome or how it's called.

 

Maybe settings matter?

Perhaps even so that a certain combination / custom settings break it?

I would guess that Original preset and both presets above it should work if unchanged.

 

Turning off full screen optimizations on the compatibility tab of the .exe made most of the stuttering disappear for me.

 

Ok, that would make sense, little weird that they didn't applied it also in base game.