Introduction

Horizon Forbidden West is finally available for PC. It's the highly anticipated sequel to the critically acclaimed Horizon Zero Dawn, continuing the epic journey of protagonist Aloy in a post-apocalyptic world. Developed by Guerrilla Games, and ported to PC by Nixxes, this action role-playing game thrusts players into a vast and visually stunning world filled with danger, mystery, and adventure. With a captivating storyline, breathtaking landscapes, and innovative gameplay mechanics, Horizon Forbidden West promises to deliver an unforgettable gaming experience for both newcomers and fans of the series alike.


Horizon Forbidden West uses the Decima Engine, which was also used by the first title, Horizon Zero Dawn. Another famous game using that engine is Death Stranding. While the engine lacks support for ray tracing, it still supports DirectX 12 and uses modern rendering techniques to enhance visual fidelity and overall performance.

In terms of upscalers you get support for NVIDIA DLSS 2 Super Resolution, DLAA and DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Also supported is AMD FSR 2 Super Resolution, but FSR 3 Frame Generation isn't included. Intel XeSS Super Resolution is available, and the game uses Microsoft's DirectStorage to load its game assets from disk efficiently.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Horizon Forbidden West on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at maximum settings, with upscaling and frame generation disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• You may change the settings in-game or using the launcher that shows up when you start the game from Steam.
• There's a checkbox to skip the launcher on every startup, so you can jump right into the game
• On the "Video" settings screen you get to choose the usual monitor-related settings
• HFW supports running windowed, borderless and fullscreen
• The "Upscale Method" menu has three options: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR 2.2 and Intel XeSS
• Anti-aliasing lets you pick from SMAA, TAA and DLAA
• Dynamic Resolution Scaling has options for 30, 45 and 60 FPS targets, below which the game will lower its settings to achieve the targeted frame rate
• V-Sync can be disabled, there is no hidden FPS cap

• There are five quality presets "Very High," "High," "Medium," "Low" and "Very Low"
• Interestingly, the "Very High" preset sets Texture Filtering to only 8xAF, you can increase it even further to 16xAF
• Field of View can be adjusted to +25%. I felt the default FOV was good enough
• Motion Blur can be disabled completely, just like Sharpening
• Besides that there are many options to further improve performance and fine-tune everything