While many gamers might already be looking towards the release of Horizon Forbidden West in February, the developers at Guerrilla Games haven’t forgotten about Aloy’s first adventure. Since Horizon Zero Dawn launched back in February of 2017, the studio has continued to offer updates for the title, including bringing it to PC in 2020. Recently, the developer has incorporated several technologies to enhance the already breathtaking visuals of the PC version.
A new update for Horizon Zero Dawn on PC has been released, introducing exciting new features to improve visual performance. This news came via a December 8 tweet from Guerrilla Games in which it detailed the contents of update 1.11. According to the developer, the PC version of the game now supports Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for Nvidia GPUs and FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) for AMD GPUs.
The introduction of these features is a big step towards improving frame rates and resolutions for many players still interested in checking out the RPG. These two upscaling technologies replace the previous FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) system, which was a much less effective upscaling method. Following this update, gamers should be able to play at increased resolutions without sacrificing as many frames per second. It’s worth noting that some older GPUs from Nvidia and AMD might not be able to take advantage of these new features.
As a result of DLSS and FSR, several changes have correspondingly taken place to the UI. Among these alterations is the removal of the Render Scale option. According to the patch notes, players can achieve the same visual settings by adjusting the UpScale Method to Simple and changing the Upscale Quality.
While these two upscaling technologies were the obvious highlight of the update, the developer noted several other improvements in Horizon Zero Dawn. With this patch now live, players should notice further performance improvements due to tweaks to the shader management system. According to the developer, shaders now compile during loading and in the background, removing the precompilation step at startup. Furthermore, this update fixes issues with stuttering.
Following this update, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for additional support for Horizon Zero Dawn. With the launch of the sequel only a couple of months away, it seems possible that most of the resources at Guerrilla Games would be centered on polishing that upcoming game. Regardless, it’s nice to see so many improvements come to the PC version over the past year.
In other news from Guerilla Games, the company recently shared new details about how combat works in Horizon Forbidden West. In a blog post from the developer, info on how enemy AI behaves during battle was shared. In addition, improvements to game audio were mentioned.
Horizon Zero Dawn is available now for PC, PS4, and PS5.
