Digital Foundry: Horizon Zero Dawn - A Disappointing Port for a great game

when I booted the game on my 4K screen in full-screen mode, something didn’t look right. It turned out that Horizon was rendering at 4K, downscaling to 1080p, then upscaling to 4K again.

Stutters in excess of 40ms, 70ms or over 100ms can happen as a cutscenes starts or ends, when a camera changes position in a cutscene, when a UI element updates for a quest, or when you are just walking around in the world not doing anything special in particular.

I thought that dropping to console-level 30fps might solve the issue but the problem is that the 30fps cap within the game actually runs at 29fps, producing even more stutter.

Yeah, this is weird. The Death Stranding port was really solid.

Well I already bought it before when it was cheaper, guess I’ll test it and see if its worth it or not. If it isn’t I’ll just refund it before the 2 hours are up.

Unfortunate that they went from the amazing port of Death Stranding to this one, admittedly it isn’t fair to compare them both. They went above and beyond for Death Stranding whereas this port is still shackled by being locked to 30 fps animations/stuttering like crazy etc.

Hopefully things can only get better for Sony games getting ported to pc.

Who made the PC port of HZD? 505’s involvement in porting the game to PC may be one reason why they managed o port that game with more success than HZD

damn was gonna probably actually finish the game on PC :confused:

Well now i wait.

That’s very unfortunate, given Death Stranding was a decently optimized port. I hope they put better effort in their future PC versions of games, especially the ones that are their flagship IPs like HZD. If the rumored Bloodborne port is done lazily, people will definetely be upset, lol.

can Bloodborne really run any worse than it did though lolol

It’s not about being worse, technically.

One of Bloodbornes biggest complaints is the framerate/framepacing, for example. You might not see it mentioned alot on the other forum because they tend to be too enamored with the game to discuss obvious flaws, but a quick online search will show you that it is a problem. If they released a straight up port with no optimization, that would be terrible. PC gamers expect a locked 60fps at the very least, along with a plethora of other enhancements and optimizations.

Too bad. I was ready to buy this day one (don’t have a PS4 atm) but between the absurd launch price and the sheer bad quality of the port, no way.

Looked at some reviews. 4/5s 9s and 8s. Like what is even the point of reviews.

My PC wouldn’t play it anyway and I recently got platinum on it but I was hoping this would be the start of Sony games on PC and it’s annoying they have messed it up.

Most likely explanation is that a DS PC port was planned all along where as PC HZD port was only a thing after the fact. You think the original version was highly optimised for PS