Horizon Zero Dawn v1.11 Adds Support For NVIDIA DLSS & AMD FSR

👤by Tim Harmer Comments 📅08.12.2021 18:11:24



Guerilla have surprised fans of Horizon Zero Dawn's PC port today with a new update that has the potential to significantly improve performance for those on mid and low-tier hardware. Horizon Zero Dawn for PC version 1.11 implements both NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, the latter of which replaces FidelityFX CAS, each of which should serve to squeeze out more frames at a given resolution with minimal loss in image quality.

Despite its age - the game debuted on PS4 in February 2017 and its PC version was released more than three years later - Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the most sumptuous feasts for the eyes that has yet landed on PC. That's despite the lack of ray-traced lighting effects, much to the shame of some more 'modern' titles.

The visual quality has an ongoing performance cost however, which may have led gamers on all hardware bands to play at lower resolutions or quality settings than they would have liked to. In today's market simply upgrading your graphics hardware is no trivial feat and so squeezing out more frames for 'free' is often a welcome addition.



NVIDIA DLSS serves as an upscaling algorithm powered by AI, leveraging the Tensor cores that are exclusive to NVIDIA RTX graphics hardware. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is supported by a wider range of hardware (including both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs), but may not have quite the same level of image quality retention as it upscales. Both techniques support upscaling to 4K so there should be should be value to adoption no matter where you sit on the performance hierarchy.

The patch also incorporates other performance improvements, particularly with regards to shader management.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition was one of the titles reduced in the recent Steam Autumn Sale, so there's a very good chance that it will make an appearance at a low price during the upcoming Winter Sale (expected to run from Dec. 22nd to Jan. 5th). Definitely one to consider if running hardware that's a bit marginal for your monitor's native resolution has dissuaded you in the past.

Hello all,

We’re happy to announce we’ve just released Patch 1.11 for our PC players. Here’s what this patch contains:

Graphical Improvements

- Added Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology.

- Added AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, replacing FidelityFX CAS.

UI Changes

- Adjusted settings screen to facilitate the addition of DLSS and FSR.

-- Render Scale option has been removed but same result can now be accomplished by adjusting setting Upscale Method to Simple and adjusting Upscale Quality.

Performance Improvements

- Improvement to the shader management system. This will result in a few noticeable differences:

-- There is no longer a shader pre-compilation step on startup. The game will always compile shaders during loading and in the background.

-- Stutters during gameplay that used to occur due to background shader compilation have now been significantly reduced.

-- Because shader compilation is still happening in the background you may notice the game having a higher CPU utilization while that is happening.

-- Loading screens will wait for the required shaders to be fully compiled. This may cause loading screens to take somewhat longer on certain systems.

-- On higher spec machines with faster CPUs the loading screens will typically be shorter, due to more efficient shader compilation that better leverages high-end CPUs.

Please ensure your game is up-to-date before heading back out into the wilds, and reach out to us if you’re still experiencing any issues. We appreciate all of your wonderful support and feedback; we wish you a fun-filled festive period!

- Guerrilla


SOURCE: /r/horizon Subreddit



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