Although Horizon Forbidden West (review) is available on PS4 and PS5 as a cross-gen game, it was especially visually impressive on PS5. The lush world looked full, the mechanical enemies looked scary, and some of the night scenes (especially in Vegas) were a sight to behold. We can summarize the PC port of Horizon Forbidden West as great. Today we will look at how Horizon Forbidden West runs on a high-end PC, how the game performs on a high-end PC, and also showcase the experience on 1 million PCs. We won’t get into this on the PlayStation console because that hasn’t changed at all for this PC port. This article will also give you an insight into how this game was released and whether it is a GPU-heavy or CPU-heavy port. So let’s dive into the world of Horizon Forbidden West on the famous and closed Windows platform.
First of all, the transition of this game from console to Windows platform is seamless because it is offered by PC Port Studio Nixxes Software, the same group that brought us games such as Spider-Man Remastered and Spider-Man: Miles. Morales, Horizon Zero Dawn Full, and God of War are a few of them. Needless to say, they know what they’re doing when it comes to porting a PlayStation game to a PC. Speaking of Horizon Forbidden West’s visual prowess, the game offers plenty of texture layers and slides to manipulate scenes. It even supports ultra-wide aspect ratios and multi-monitor setups for a wide viewing angle and an immersive viewing experience. You won’t be disappointed with this game if you want to use your computer’s capabilities.
Rating: 9 / 10
Benchmarks
Regarding the game’s performance, we played it on a high-end desktop PC we built ourselves. It has an Intel i9-14900K CPU, 48GB of RAM with a 7200MT/s speed, a 2TB Kingston Renegade Fury Gen4 NVMe SSD, and an Nvidia RTX 4070 Super. It is powered by an ASUS ROG Maximus HERO motherboard and has a gold-certified Antec 1000W PSU. Our PC’s RTX 4070 Super has 12GB of VRAM available. Three widely used standard resolutions were used to run the game: FHD, QHD, and UHD. It was in this place that we discovered the game could look amazing with sufficient resources. During the game’s opening sequence, we were walking through a lovely, green forest and noticed a lot of nuances that added to the realism.
Let’s examine some performance indicators. With frame creation turned ON and upscaling set to quality utilizing DLSS at the Very High graphical setting (Very High is the highest graphical preset),
Our average at UHD was 85 frames per second.
The average frame rate for QHD was 118 frames per second.
The average frame rate at FHD was 139 fps, with a 9GB VRAM usage.
We also saw no stuttering or irregular frame rates, indicating that this performance was stable.
Hardware Ray Tracing is sadly absent from the game, especially given its stunning visuals. Other than that, there’s nothing wrong with the game’s fidelity. You won’t be deprived of the immersive haptic magic that Sony has created with the PS5 controller because it also supports the DualSense controller.
More tests
Finally, let’s see what happens when you play the game on a lighter machine. When I tested the game in the HIGH graphics version on a high-end laptop with an RTX 4050 (6 GB VRAM at 60W TGP), although the laptop gave us a steady rate of 35 FPS (average) at 1080P, the game consumed almost all the GPU VRAM (5 GB) covered.
When switching to 720P, the frame rate increased to 45FPS, but VRAM remained at 5100 MB, the same as 1080P. This indicates that a limit that prevents the game from consuming all available VRAM on the GPU. It would be nice to have VRAM available when playing Horizon Forbidden West. As for the CPU, if you have the latest mid-range CPU like the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or something as low as the Intel i3-8100 you should still be able to play and enjoy the game.
