Horizon Zero Dawn - Technical Reviews

Some sites have tested the technical quality of the Horizon Zero Dawn PC port:

Ars Technica - Horizon Zero Dawn on PC: Not the optimized port we were hoping for

Eurogamer - Horizon Zero Dawn's PC port is deeply disappointing

Digital Foundry - Horizon Zero Dawn PC: An Amazing Game Gets A Disappointing Port

PC Invasion - Horizon Zero Dawn technical review - Can't see the forest

Rock Paper Shotgun - Despite stellar performance on our end, Horizon Zero Dawn's PC port has been nearly unplayable for others

More information.

Oh boy let me grab my popcorn again. Lets get ready to rumble. Ding…Ding…Begin.

Hand-picked by HiddenX and approved by Couchpotato's newest sock puppet.

Those 5 links above provide no practical info for an end user who has problems, except some suggestions from digital foundry where keeping motion blur is… not desirable. Blur in any game looks like shit, and in case of HZD also doesn't help the game performance at all.

The game plays smooth on my machine no questions asked. Which is actually not normal. Usually if a game has bugs, somehow, I find all those bugs, even unreported ones. And all of you know this already, especially those who never saw a bug in Skyrim where I found a new one every 3 minutes of playthrough.

Anyway, instead of joining the yelling "wolf" party, I've researched based on steam feedback what could possibly go wrong on machines where the game misbehaves and how to correct it.
I could list all stutter/crash causes from my older post in another thread and add also some more that emerged in the meantime. But what's the point if all we'll ever see are articles on (some) problems and not on solutions.

I do love the glass half-empty hand-picking headers in these reviews.

Some opinions head with "Bad port, bad performance, bad optimisation", while one opintion heads with "stellar performance! But we heard in a legend written in elven during the second war of the orcs, that others are having troubles, and so we should mention it in the header".

Curious that the one empathic review that cares about other people's rigs, specs and experiences is the one that considers it to be a "stellar" port. The ones who had a less optimal experience with the port don't give a crap about empaty, or whether the game has stellar performance for others, they straight away write the port off as being bad. It'll never be a problem of their own because, I don't know, they have inappropriate specs, or like someone said, they're refusing to update Windows because, reasons. If I can't play it in my precise 2 years old obscure version of Windows, the port is bad, period. I don't care if others are playing it perfectly at 60FPS. Biased much? I thought so.

This is getting old.

This is pretty biased hiddenx. For the sake of fairness can you post all the technical reviews that say it runs great and is well optimized.

sakichop said:

This is pretty biased hiddenx. For the sake of fairness can you post all the technical reviews that say it runs great and is well optimized.

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I searched with Google for "technical review horizon zero dawn" - and there are no positive ones.

That's interesting because those don't all seem like technical reviews.

Other reviews that mention techincal aspects were pretty easy to find. I'm surprised you missed them.

Game Rant - The port itself ticks all of the boxes that PC gamers could hope for.

AOTF - The game is incredibly optimized

Trusted Reviews - This port pushes the envelope further in terms visuals and
performance that it’s simply more enjoyable to play.

Gaming Trend - Runs on any reasonable PC

Areajugones - Very well optimized for less powerful hardware. 4/5 General port quality.

@JDR13; These reviews are not technical at all - they just say the game runs great, without further tests on different hardware setups.

Technical shortcomings aside, the game does the PC port brilliantly, with all PC-friendly resolutions, keybindings, mouse detection/compatibility, onscreen/menu prompts, etc. It's discouraging to see some of you trying so hard to throw dirt on a game/studio that actually did things right. So some people are having issues with framerates, we get that. They are trying to improve them with fixes and hotfixes as we speak. But know what? At least I don't have to navigate through menus that have a PS4 controller as default settings, and that tell me on screen that I should press Square to jump, or that only allows me to move through menus using arrow keys, pressing obscure keys to switch tabs because the game doesn't even know what a mouse is.

For those of you who are dissing HZD PC port, either you haven't seen what a PC port usually looks like, or your ego went too far in this ridiculous vendetta in which you made it all personal and all that matters is to be right at that time when you said that it's a bad port. And the most incomprehensible part of all is that this camp of people in RPGWatch is populated entirely by those who haven't even installed the game in their PC to know what they're talking about, while those who have played it and are playing it, to my knowledge are all claiming that small, tweakable issues aside, it's an excellent port.

Instead of selectively looking for reviews that accommodate to what you need to listen to feel better, take it from us, your fellow Watchers. We wouldn't mislead you or intentionally make you spend €50 so we can giggle in devilish glee at our mischievous deeds when you find that the game is actually unplayable. It is a very good port, and it will only get better.

The metacritic user score is falling minute by minute.
Here's the Steam dicussion forum.

I will not touch my PC version this year, even with a new computer. Maybe I should buy a PS4 + the game for 300 bucks instead.

HiddenX said:

@JDR13; These reviews are not technical at all - they just say the game runs great, without further tests on different hardware setups.

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Nope…check the last one. It does exactly that.

HiddenX said:

I will not touch my PC version this year, even with a new computer. Maybe I should buy a PS4 + the game for 300 bucks instead.

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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I didn't think you were the type to get butthurt like this.

The Spanish site you mentioned:

• Support is missing for some technologies available on PC such as DLSS and Ray Tracing
• Sometimes it can consume a large amount of RAM
• The graphic settings panel could be more complete
• Some kinematics do not work correctly on monitors with high refresh rate
• There are certain textures that make the frame rate drop
• The initial load of the game (the first time we run it) is excessively long

Available technologies score: 3/5

Doesn't sound so great as well.

Yes, unlike you, they list everything positive and negative.

Their final score is a 9.3/10. I think that sums up the overall experience they had.

Some of those negatives seem a bit unreasonable. I don't think there's any reason to expect raytracing and DLSS. The initial load of the game is slow because it's pre-compiling shaders. That should only need to happen once, and improves performance in-game. That's something we'll see more often with DX12 and Vulkan games. Consuming a large amount of RAM is often a good thing, too, in terms of performance - the more the better, so long as it's available.

The framerate drops and cinematics seem to be something that needs looking into.

Playing devil's advocate, I've at least heard of the review sites in Hidden's OP - which is more than can be said for JDR's googlefu search results.

That's neither here nor there to me, however, as I have no interest in the title. From gameplay footage, it reminds me of Monster Hunter World - a game I would purchase first (but have yet to do so).

Ya'll should be playing Factorio 1.0 regardless!

Drithius said:

Playing devil's advocate, I've at least heard of the review sites in Hidden's OP - which is more than can be said for JDR's googlefu search results. !

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Welll I'm sure those sites are far less credible now since you say you're not familiar with them. Thanks for letting us know.

Though I find it sort of odd you've never heard of Trusted Reviews or AOTF (Attack of the Fanboy) since those are fairly popular sites. I've also visited Game Rant quite a few times.

JDR13 said:

Though I find it sort of odd you've never heard of Trusted Reviews or AOTF (Attack of the Fanboy) since those are fairly popular sites.

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I don't typically keep track of any review sites these days as, more often than not, the reviews are focused on games I don't particularly care about (twitch combat, graphics over gameplay, console-centric UIs). Not to mention having to filter through the plethora of 'reviews' that are little more than some angsty bearded dude in his basement. Of all the links in this thread, the only one I'd consider reading (if I were interested in the game) would probably be RPS. Am I out of touch with the current gamer demographic? Undoubtedly.

I don't typically keep track of any review sites these days as, more often than not, the reviews are focused on games I don't particularly care about (twitch combat, graphics over gameplay, console-centric UIs). Not to mention having to filter through the plethora of 'reviews' that are little more than some angsty bearded dude in his basement. Of all the links in this thread, the only one I'd consider reading (if I were interested in the game) would probably be RPS. Am I out of touch with the current gamer demographic? Undoubtedly.

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What he said.

Zephyr said:

What he said.

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Me too. I pretty much rely on word of mouth from fellow Watchers or I follow studios that I know and like on Twitter.