Back to the early days of PlayStation exclusivity Horizon Zero Dawn launched on PC last year, it’s a bit of a stroke of luck whether you have a smooth functioning port or a mess that keeps crashing. These days however, the PC version is in much better shape and just today received a major upgrade in the form of support for Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Supersampling) and AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution).
Notice in patch notes posted on Reddit, both types of performance enhancement technology will be available in the main display settings menu once you have installed the patch. As always, DLSS is specific to Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards, while FSR is available for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs – good news if you haven’t upgraded to one of these yet. best graphics card with RTX capabilities.
That said, I just did a quick test of both DLSS and FSR and Nvidia’s version makes the post-apocalyptic green HZD look a lot better. On my RTX 3090 (tested with an Intel Core i9-10900K) both the Balance and Quality settings for DLSS look as good as the native resolution, with less shimmer and aliasing than the FSR. Keep in mind that the latter doesn’t have its own anti-aliasing, instead inheriting whatever original AA the game chose – TAA, in this case.
More positively for AMD Radeon owners, the FSR seems to push out several more frames by a few seconds than the equivalent DLSS setting. Running the HZD’s in-game benchmark at 2560×1440, and with the Ultra graphics preset, the FSR’s Ultra High Quality setting produced an average of 147 fps; besides the 130 fps upscaling when running TAA without upscaling, that’s 141 fps faster than DLSS ‘Quality’. However, reducing DLSS to ‘Balanced’ still keeps images looking sharper and smoother than FSR, while the average rate is 148fps, so that’s the setting to go if you have a card RTX graphics.
Numbers games aside, it’s fun that a game that was first released on consoles almost five years ago – and is one of my all-time favorites – is still receiving great reviews. Substantial update on PC today. Although it also wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Guerrilla Games dropped it to work on the PC version of Forbidden Horizon in the West, Guerrilla? Open? Open? Open?
