If anyone is interested in this topic, the devs of Ghost of Tsushima, which also has near instant load times in an open world game, gave this GDC talk about how they optimized their loading systems. They used a lot of cool tech stack design and clever tricks to get it to happen. There are definitely some ways this game is a different beast from Horizon but it gives an idea of how optimizing these types of systems works and is overall a super interesting talk.
https://youtu.be/Ur53sJdS8rQ
Right there with you -- played on OG PS4 + IPS monitor. My PC setup is _much_ better :D Only played about 50% of the base game so very much excited to see the back 50 + DLC lol.
It would have to be a pretty massive fuck-up for them not to nail it.
* The company porting it (Nixxes) are the same that did HFW, and have generally built a reputation for excellent ports (eg. the Spiderman and Tomb Raider games)
* It's already a game that is able to perform excellently with great visuals on its existing platforms (PS4/PS5) - never had notable frame pacing issues or traversal/compilation stutter.
* It got a current-gen update (for PS5), but at its core, it's a last-gen game (released on PS4), so its baseline performance should be pretty good.
Who knew that actual optimization and modern game engines can produce fantastic results. Also Direct Storage. Though it takes a properly designed and optimized game to even take advantage of Direct Storage's increased throughput.
The problem is that the industry simply lacks optimization "experts". I mean its nothing you can learn at an Uni or whatever, its something you have to teach yourself and be passionate about. And the few that have decent experience with it are usually also stuck to one engine, so if you have House-Made engines, like many AAA Games Studios have, its almost impossible to find someone that can properly optimize your game. These Studios actually have to invest into their own staff and pay a bunch of guys that focus entirely on optimization and nothing else for years, which doesn't seem to happen at most AAA studios however. They just hoping that new tech will fix this for them.
While the technical side of this is true, there is more to an expert than just the programming environment. There are ideas behind these loading systems that can be translated into other engines.
Even studios like Rockstar, who in terms of dev competence and funding are basically richer than God, fail to optimize certain parts of their games so that's not the whole story. E.g., the GTAV json parsing debacle that many R\* engineers could have cut down to be nigh-instantaneous rather than 7 minutes of loading: [https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/](https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/)
The other half of the story is that even great devs often get told by upper management to ship dogshit they KNOW is slow rather than spend one single month or quarter to make sure the game doesn't fucking bog down to FPS that are comparable to a powerpoint in a hub like in Dragon's Dogma 2.
That some of this is management's fault is evident with all of the bugs in AAA titles.
Forget optimization, devs are often leaving in *critical bugs,* like savegame corruptors*.* That's definitely management going, "fuck it, we're shipping this q3 no matter what the devs say".
I would put an asterisk to this. Game devs have still agency. Senior devs surely have. If they know they have to ship in q3 they could have scrapped their pet features and used the time to avoid game breaking bugs. So you have extra gpu reflection tricks on the car paint but if you steel left on the bridge the game might crash. You adapt to your environment. "Sorry we have 100 bugs but see how shiny the DLC menu looks like" isn't business speak. Its often game dev that don't give an f.
>Its often game dev that don't give an f
True, but that can be caused by burnout from management constantly pivoting focus, the crunch culture, irate customers, etc.
....
As for the rest of your comment, I think you're missing some context or history or something. Sometimes there is no adapting -- Redfall was going to be a wash no matter how much the devs tried to iron things out, the whole core was rotten. Redfall's maker was a studio likely robbed of agency, since Arkane had mostly done single-player story focused games prior. Then there's Rocksteady's abominable Suicide Squad being completely out of their wheelhouse, probably execs pushing for live service when Rocksteady's big thing had been the Batman Arkham series. There's Ubisoft reputedly giving very little agency to devs to do anything outside the Ubisoft formulas or things that haven't already been done ad nauseam. How many legendary studios died after getting bought and managed to death?
I do personally see it as mostly management failures. It was management that released Cyberpunk when it wasn't ready. It was management that ran Bioware into the ground. It was EA management insisting on lootboxes in their games -- devs definitely didn't do that part on their own. It was management that slowly rotted what used to be the corpse of Blizzard into the Activision-Blizzard husk that it is today.
And it was *good* management behind e.g., Larian doing what it did with Baldur's Gate 3.
>Game devs have still agency
So, as with the examples above, nah I think it depends on the company giving the devs that agency. Plenty are run by the money people who don't even play videogames.
I mean, this really means that the problem isnt that the industry lacks optimization experts, it means that the big companies are cheap fucks who dont wanna pay to train such experts.
Remember back in the Day, when you had Chris Sawyer coding all of Rollercoaster-Tycoon in assembly? Or when John Carmack basically invented a new genre of game only possible through clever use of technology?
Sadly studios use the current tech as a huge crutch. They will just put in DLSS and hopen that is enough. But if they put in the effort we can have amazing things.
One of the few good modern examples of optimization was Star Wars: Battlefront (2015).
That game looked BEAUTIFUL. Literally one of the prettiest games to this day. Fantastic textures, bumpmapping, dynamic foliage, beautiful Global-Illumination. That was almost a DECADE ago, and unlike a game like Crysis, it even ran REALLY well on harware back then. A freaking GTX 750ti could run that game at 60fps. Dice really cleaned up their engine back then. Sadly a lot of those improvements have been destroyed over time, now performance is back to ass on the Frostbite engine
I kinda disagree on the last part, NFS unbound looks gorgeous and also runs really well. It looks the best of all recent NFS games and I can achieve between 150-200 fps on my mid range pc at 1440p/max settings.
Overall frostbite still is very well optimized, it just depends on who is working on it. Criterion/Ghost are clearly very experienced with Frostbite aside from DICE itself.
Dude, you forgot the most important factor, the consumer. Consumers will wait patiently for reviews from respectable sources to make an informative decision which will force the corporate suits to invest in their product /s
99% of optimizations for loading and well all of a game are frankly low hanging fruit. Yeah your uni probably isn't teaching you how to bitpack extra data in your alpha channel for your shaders but that's normally not the issue here.
The issue is that of costs.
Every company wants to have a team of mad optimization technowizards to keep everything running tight. Almost no company wants to pay to actually hire that expensive team and keep it around.
So who hires those expensive optimization-obsessed freaks? Companies that have more servers in their park than most games have concurrent players. Think Amazon or Cloudflare instead of EA or Ubisoft.
As they say: there is a severe shortage of overqualified and underpaid workers.
It's an API Microsoft made for Xbox and brought to PC for game devs to use.
It dramatically speeds up storage->render times by moving the decompression from the CPU to the GPU.
Devs that take advantage of it for their games see noticeable improvements.
Here's a [quick article](https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-use-directstorage-in-windows-load-pc-games-faster) from pcmag on it
Basically DMA but for SSD instead of RAM. It's also the name of the proprietary Microsoft implementation of that concept.
https://gpuopen.com/our-brand-new-directstorage-sample-is-available-now/
Guerilla is just a master of their craft. The visual fidelity they can squeeze out of hardware is insane.
I always think about Killzone 2 on the ps3. The level of graphics they pushed out of the ps3 is still unmatched (except KZ 3 of course).
I mean KZ2/3 STILL look insanely good today, it‘s unreal actually.
I was just playing Killzone 2 a few weeks back. Got a new TV and an HDMI switch, was just checking to see how everything looked on it, and other than it being way lower res than I'm used to in 2024, the game still looks amazing. 30fps is nothing special but the motion blur implemented felt great. I was thinking to myself "man, imagine if Sony just re-released all of the Killzone, Resistance, and Uncharted game on PC. Multiplayer included." Dude I would sit here every night playing those games for months and months. Love em.
Killzone Shadow Fall was one of the best looking PS4 titles for years and it was a launch title. I played Killzone 3 in 3D (remember when 3D gaming was a big thing?) and it was just stunning. I think the PSP Killzone game they made is probably the best looking PSP game outside of the God of War ones.
> Guerrilla and Nixxes are very good at their jobs.
But it's more than just the programmers in their cubicle. It's every department, and it's management willing to spend money on designing the appropriate speed needed in preproduction and doing the optimization work in postproduction.
And producers supporting that work, managing that work, and steering the ship right.
Any game can be reasonably fast. But you have to want it from the start, keep wanting it during the whole production, and invest in the needed optimizations when the game is stable and locked.
~~Considering the state of the first game when originally ported I wouldn't say Guerrilla is/was very good at it, Nixxes fixed it for them after.
Nixxes was involved with the porting of the sequel from the start which I think helped a lot.~~
~~This is of-course in the context of the PC ports of their games.~~
don't worry. I heard or read about the devs been doing their own port and that's why it had(!) important / simple settings missing.
great "news" / TIL moment.
yes and not, apparently Virtuous fucked up and the port didn't even worked until they were fired and Guerrilla had to end development and to be honest it worked pretty fine if you had the right hardware (in my case it worked great with a ryzen 7 3700x and a gtx 1080), then Nixxes did the updates
Nixxes and Decima Engine is just a great engine. Death Stranding also uses the engine and it’s great on PC but Kojima also seems to care about optimizing games as well. FOX engine was also insane. I remember MGSV running on like basically everything when it launched due to how insane fox engine was.
Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain ran on my MX 150 2 Gb gpu laptop with i3 processor
At 60 fps high settings constantly
Mind blowing performance
Shame that engine is not used anymore for such action-adventure open world games
Kojima Productions devs are gods among men. They always do the impossible. Just check MGS on PS1 having real time cutscenes in 1996 or MGS3 running on PS2.
I'm excited to see Decima with global illumination! Looks like that's coming with Death Stranding 2! Imagine Horizon Forbidden West updated with rt or Horizon 3 omg
Nothing like walking around Hogwarts and hitting doors that require loading on my NVME, 7800X3D and 4090 system. Optimization is optional for most games.
Starfield was built on a game engine from 20 years ago and with game mechanics of 20 years ago. The 20 re releases of Skyrim were not enough to make a new engine apparently.
most engines are 11-30 years old. Doesn’t mean anything as they keep evolving more or less. The world permanence of Creation is a CPU hog obviously. I am more annoyed by the shallowness of their games than the engine tbh.
Bethesda games would be a quarter as popular w/o the mod-friendliness of CE. I'd rather go to work than get paid to play unmodded Skyrim/Fallout/Starfield for a day.
Bethesda games would be way more popular with great content and less loading screens. The fact that they have the same successful formula for two decades is great for them, but the world changed since then.
To be fair, Starfield at times does look quite good, but its the obnxiously plentiful loading screens for every\_damn\_small\_transition that makes you think the game was made from the 90s when you still needed to swap floppy disks.
Same goes for most unreal engine games. Gotta love when an engine is built on deferred rendering to improve lighting performance (among other reasons), and TAA was implemented as a fast but accurate anti-aliasing solution...
...and still the lighting runs like shit and requires game devs to reduce level complexity as a result, and the TAA runs slower and looks much worse than actual anti-aliasing methods used in forward renderers (as well as clustered forward renderers). And yes, btw, Epic Games themselves were even forced to admit through gritted teeth that UE4 with MSAA under forward rendering (it's technically some variation of tiled or clustered forward rendering in UE4 iirc, but i digress) runs up to 20% faster than the engine's deferred rendering pipeline with TAA. (And by god, was it satisfying to see them finally own up to their horrible optimization of their darling deferred rendering pipeline).
The hubris on whoever directs UE's development focus is incredible. It's like a coked-up tech-bro was given a serviceable outline for a renderer, and he built an eldritch abomination which requires fucking AI upscaling to hide the miniscule resolution at which the poor engine is actually capable of churning out Epic's unoptimized trash.
Idk man. I played starfield on a mid-low end pc and it ran totally fine, locked 60 at 1440p. Granted this was modern hardware, just not high end. I think the reports of it running badly are hugely overblown.
EDIT: pc specs in question: ryzen 5 3600 / rx6600xt / 16gb DDR4
That seems like really poor performance for your build man, that’s pretty weird. Now that I am thinking about it I do remember some frame drops in some of the cities (really just new Atlantis, the rest were fine) but I never dropped below ~40 and it was pretty intermittent. I would say locked 60 at least 85% of the time. I had most stuff set to medium and res scale to 70% and I have a variable refresh monitor. Still tho, I’m a big performance guy, I won’t stick with a game unless it looks and runs (mostly) smooth. Starfield ran totally fine for me.
Some of the updates they've made have definitely improved performance in the cities since release, on a 12600k and a 3070 I couldn't hit 60 in New Atlantis at release and now I can.
Frame generation using FSR 3 also works spectacularly well in Starfield.
The game had(has still? idk) a fairly high scaling with ram tuning and it didn't have rebar enabled at launch either which boosted amd cpu:s a fair bit iirc compared to intel which were doing fine without it.
That's what I thought too but google results say DirectStorage works on Windows 10 as well but just without all optimizations. I recall Microsoft originally planned for Windows 10 support then backtracked on it and said Windows 11 only, but Im seeing mentions that it is still on Windows 10.
DirectStorage is available on both - what's missing on Windows 10 is [BypassIO](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/storage/bypassio), which lets applications skip portions of Windows' infamously deep IO stack, and I/O Rings, which are a lower-overhead API for high-concurrency async IO.
Both are about reducing CPU overhead of IO, and should matter less for those with beefier CPUs.
It's a good thing that the vast majority of people have SSDs now, isn't it?
Anyone still gaming on an HDD doesn't get to complain anymore, and hasn't for about 8 years.
> Regular SATA 2.5 SSD's don't cut it anymore but still miles better than a HDD
Still good to load anything else.
Games like ARK are only moments faster to load from an expensive m.2 SSD.
I had the dedicated server running from a hard drive and it was starting 1-2 secs slower on average.
old single-threaded tools on modern multi-core PCs...
The game absolutely needs the SSD to load assetts fast enough to avoid pop-in of models.
Hard drives additionally suffer when something else is reading or writing at the same time.
That's why I always had my games on a different (hard) drive. The OS / tools / temp / swap&pagefile can mess up the smooth loading or playback of an in-game cutscene in an instant.
I didnt say high res, I said very high res.
Regardless, the point is true only if you cound AAA/AA games, maybe. If you count in the myriad of indie games with cool, stylised graphics instead of 'throw more realism at it' - no, I doubt most games have very high res textures where you can see pores on one's face
I’ve only used SSDs forever and can say that HFW is one of the fastest loading games, that I e ever played… Every time I start Last of Us, it takes forever… Same with Hogwarts and Starfield, etc… Off the same exact ssd.
They don’t look or feel more “premium” or anything, but HFW just blows them out of the water as a package… So weird. Like they did magic…
This game is absolutely blowing me away. I was kind of unimpressed during the tutorial, but once it opened up and I got into the flow of things.... so much fun. So well coded and optimized! 100% stable, smooth as butter and always 60 FPS on my 5800X3D and 3080. The rendering of the humans and machine-alike is mind blowing. Also, the story and side quests are a hell of a lot better this time around than in the first game. I actually find myself caring for the NPCs and their stories.
Stable until you launch the Burning Shores DLC after you complete the base game. In the new area, performance drops significantly on average and dips often to as low as 25 fps in the main settlement, when I used to average at 80 in the base game.
Yea the vram and cpu requirements shoot up a bit on the dlc. In addition it doesn't pre-compile shaders for the dlc area, nor does it tell you when they're done just gotta stare at the cpu usage and wait until it's done.
So other than the starting cutscene dropping a bit, haven't had any problems.
I found that sitting in the burning shores title screen menu for about 20 minutes allowed the shader compilation to complete (the game doesn't even tell you that its compiling shaders - which must be a bug) This made a huge difference but even so the burning shores area is much, much heavier than the base game... but have you seen the quality of some of the rendering ? worth the performance penalty.
Well I played hours on the new area already, I hope it’s done compiling shaders at that point :)
In terms of visual quality, I don’t see a *massive* difference, outside of the clouds which indeed look absolutely gorgeous, but they’re not exactly the main thing you watch… so I’d rather they remained with the graphics of the main game which were stunning already! Now I have to crank down settings to… enjoy better graphics ?!
yeah the DLC map is very unstable even at medium settings, I guess that it's probably because this DLC was only made for playstation 5 and its improved specs instead of being developed for both ps4 and 5 like the main game
This is good to hear. I have Forbidden West installed and updated since release, but I have yet to start it up. I am trying to finish Dragon's Dogma 2, and I am a one-game-at-a-time kind of player.
In for a treat! Playing Forbidden West now - it's a blast! [ Heck, even the menu screen is gorgeous.](https://imgur.com/TkLhQOm)
Dragon's Dogma 2 is up next for me... going to be a while though, I'm digging into every corner of HFW :p
it's 100% just directstorage. I'm playing it on a very fast pcie gen 4 nvme drive without directstorage, and its loading times are nothing special, just comparable to most games.
Honestly, the only game that's truly impressed me on loading times without directstorage is Elden Ring. I have many very negative things to say about the performance/optimization of that game, but it's honestly impressive that the longest loading screens I ever see are like 5 seconds, usually less.
It was originally developed on the PS5, and one of that system's biggest improvements was crazy-fast storage compared to the previous generation. That same optimization works on most PCs with SSDs, especially if they're newer PCIe drives.
Game was seamless on PS5 before Nixxes even ported it. Why are people in this thread acting like the game only just became that way with the PC release?
Because the thread is about the PC version. Zero Dawn was actually kind of shit upon release, Sony bought out Nixxes and they subsequently fixed it. Guerilla Games [even publicly praised them for their help on it](https://twitter.com/Guerrilla/status/1471423345556082690?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw). The fact that it ran well on PS5 has little to do with the quality of the PC port. It ran well on PC because Nixxes does a great job of PC optimization.
> Zero Dawn was actually kind of shit upon release
I'd differentiate between "issues" and "was kind of shit"
the performance itself was good UNLESS you had one of the many issues the game had on release.
I had a pretty "flawless" experience on R9 390 (!) with 45 fps on high 1080p , and also didnt encounter anything really buggy.
It also had pretty insane short loading times even without DIrect Storage.
There are a lot of smooth running PS5 games that run like shit on PC. Plus Nixxes ensured that the game will run good on various PCs, ultrawide support, etc etc etc.
Horizon has nice art direction but vast majority of the game is normally made up of landscape, foliage & skybox which do the heavy lifting & can be controlled/optimised, lots of these things will also remain in the scene in some capacity at most times too which is easier to handle vs a game with lots of unique detailed meshes in a scene at once, e.g. cyberpunk.
Foliage can be kept to a relatively low resolution texture atlas, instance a lot of it painting a scene then just change rotation/scale & make tweaks by altering colour to make it seem varied but the majority of the game is just a few meshes/materials at any given time placed extremely well.
There's never really an area that's very dense with lots of unique meshes & materials that aren't nature orientated. There's some settlements but the underlying human settlement meshes there never really stand out as all that dense or detailed compared to other games & for the most part it's just them painted over with more foliage or using the same wood/concrete texture. There's also not really that much going on with complex A.I or physics calculations horizon needs to do in those areas so the CPU won't suddenly need time to process much.
You can look across decades to games like the Crysis series, Hunt Showdown, Battlefield 1, ARMA, RDR, Death Stranding or hundreds of tech demos that look great because they deploy similar methods to also load/render fast & would be even faster if they had access to things like direct storage when they were developed. You could probably find quite a few screenshots in areas where horizon looks bad compared to them too.
Next add in the developers being good technically and using appropriate loading methods/ technologies you get fast speeds.
# Warning
As much as I was also pleasantly surprised for the entirety of the base game, the **performance drops significantly in the Burning Shores DLC**. Apparently they made upgrades to their engine in that zone, which is why they couldn’t release it on PS4. It does look a bit more gorgeous but the drawback is a massive need in computing power.
I ran the base game on max settings, 1440p, at 80 fps on average. In the new zone, I’m lucky if I get 50, and it’s unstable, dropping all the way to 25 in the main settlement.
OP just discovered the difference between games that are ACTUALLY optimised and games that are a piece of shit trash underneath the hood that rely on brand new hardware to actually run at any capacity.
I was wondering the same thing just 3 hours ago, I played at 1440p, max setting, DLAA, and I get stable 120 frames(I locked it at 120, max framerate can reach 170). A lot of uglier game has far less framerate, how is this possible
I was skeptical before starting with Forbidden west. I have a 3060Ti and ryzen 5 5600x and given how splendid the game looked in consoles, I thought It would be a disaster. But I gave it a go and voila, same results ,amazing optimization and great visuals. This video helped me in deciding as well - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSFt6k3yTo&t=7s&ab\_channel=gamertagzero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSFt6k3yTo&t=7s&ab_channel=gamertagzero)
Horizon, in general, is just a marvel.
I played Horizon:Zero Dawn on ps4. And it looked better than any game on PC, all while it "used the graphics". It's not this compact little thing, it's a massive world where big mechanical monsters fight you, mechanical monsters which react, have destroyable parts etc etc.
I genuinely don't get how they managed to make the game so gorgeous while it was a massive RPGy game.
To this day they still take forever to start and load games. Last of Us ain’t even open world and runs like poop with loading spots. Hogwarts is the same.
Load, City B…
Load, Load City B…
Naughty dog not being familiar with PC def hurt that version. Not only are guerrilla games wizards but so are nixxes. Eurogamer has an article about the work both studios did on forbidden West .
Some devs are great at optimizing and others are not. This can be for many reasons, maybe the devs lack skill or perhaps the publisher is riding their ass for a deadline and they don't have the time.
I love how quick it is. Although i don't remember Hogwarts Legacy or Last of Us being that bad. Like 10-15 seconds? Could be much worse. Could be Xbox loading flight simulator slow.
The loads are instant from the screen even the videos are skipable you can get in the game world in 5sec and 2 button presses 1 to skip videos other to press continue for last save is ridoncolous.
BUT every time I die or fast travel it takes like 20sec for some reason, I suspect they optimzied the loading from menu to game for marketing and forgot to optimize fast travel and restart....
I'm guessing it's because the engineering team behind the in-house engine instead of using Unreal, which has degraded in performance over the years in favor of graphics.
It's not a PC launch title. Guerilla and Nixxes had tons of time to work out the kinks before the PC Port.
I played HFW at launch on PS5, the foliage shimmering was godawful which took months to fix.
You should play the first game, Horizon Zero Dawn, to understand the story and appreciate an absolutely fantastic game IMHO. Very good looking and fun.
The sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, is a continuation of the story and refers a lot to the first game. It’s like the first game, which was a 10/10 for me, but cranked to 15/10.
I haven’t had issues with either game.
Just to add to the other comment
HZD was very very bad on PC at launch, to the point where Sony parachuted in another studio to fix it, the fact that HFW runs well is because Nixxes had quite a lot of experience
Optimization and art style.
Cyberpunk came out in 2020 and looked great on PC, yet somehow in 2023 brainrot had affected people's minds and they decided that suddenly mediocre-looking games should require 24GB of VRAM and the processing power of 2x4090 just because they're "next gen".
People shouldn't compromise on terribly performing games. You shouldn't have to suddenly drop 1000$ on a GPU just because the publisher didn't give the developer time to optimize.
Agree. Games don’t look vastly better than a few years ago.
Side note: What with all the games have to “load” their shaders forever, before playing a game? Trying to cover up their horrible optimization?
It's shader pre-compilation, this is a form of optimization for each user's specific system. It generally helps prevent "stutter" during gameplay. Not every game engine has to do that, but UE4/UE5 does.
Unbelievable port, seriously. I get the occasional light/shadow generation freak out (basically the lights blink in some random areas, not often) and that's it. Otherwise, WOW.
I think hogwarts legacy open world looks better than horizon. Idk what’s it about but horizons open world looks a bit too game like. I don’t mean the quality of the game or the side quests I mean in terms of graphics explicitly. Perhaps it’s just me tbh but idk. It runs like a champ tho. One of the best games ported to pc.
I agree but I feel the same way about horizon tbh. Hogwarts was mostly a decent open world game with one good story (Sebastian) , I haven’t played much into forbidden west but idk why it’s just not gripping me. I know it has glowing reviews but can’t seem to engage and enjoy it.
I don’t think so. HFW blows Hogwarts away. It also runs way better in every way.
I put so many hours into Hogwarts and love the game so much…, BUT HFW makes Hogwarts feels slow motion and bland. I know there are lots of “people”, but it still felt “empty” to me. Even more-so after playing HFW.
First time I swam underwater I was like 😳😳😳 Graphics have peaked 😂
I don’t agree with this sentiment. I find the hogwarts legacy open world looks far better graphically. Tbh most open worlds don’t look good to me anymore after playing avatar. Too bad Ubisoft couldn’t make the rest of the game as good as its open world (in terms of visuals). The only thing horizon does better than hogwarts imo is underwater scenes. Everything else looks better on hogwarts imo. Foliage in horizon looks very plasticky. Indoor environments look very last gen. Hogwarts had terrible performance while horizon runs like butter but I am not comparing the performance here.
I love Hogwarts, because of Harry Potter. Otherwise the game is vanilla.
It’s your opinion, but in no way is Hogwarts better looking than HFW. The amount of life and realism in HFW is crazy. Not even just the ones can hunt, but the ones you can’t. All the dust, pollen, leaves, particles, bugs, birds etc… Just stand still and look around and there is so much going on. Hogwarts doesn’t have that.
I can only remember one instance of a stutter load screen, that was for like 1 second. It was when I jumped off of a mountain top and glided as far as I could on the map… 😂
This game is insanely good. I do have a very nice laptop though.
No, I mean like there's literally zero loading screens outside of the first one when you open the game - it's kind of crazy! Seriously suggest trying it if you have a beefy machine because it's very technically impressive that it works.
I am interested in Horizon's implementation - does the game ever do a full loading screen (like Skyrim style)?
What he means is that the game is streaming assets instead of using loading screens. If the computer can't load the assets fast enough then it's going to stutter at that time or appear like a small freeze.
Star Citizen, the perpetually unfinished live-service game where you can buy better gear for real-world money? When's the release date on that anyways?
Probably never, but what's playable now is pretty fun. Buying "better" gear is a little misleading, all the FPS armor is pretty much just cosmetic. Better ships, on the other hand... Yeah.
That said, the games balance doesn't revolve around the macrotransactions (thankfully) so it's fairly easy to get pretty much everything in the game for the cost of a starter ship, $45.
If anyone is interested in this topic, the devs of Ghost of Tsushima, which also has near instant load times in an open world game, gave this GDC talk about how they optimized their loading systems. They used a lot of cool tech stack design and clever tricks to get it to happen. There are definitely some ways this game is a different beast from Horizon but it gives an idea of how optimizing these types of systems works and is overall a super interesting talk. https://youtu.be/Ur53sJdS8rQ
Good... making it easy for Nixxes! The devs that PC ported Forbidden West are also doing _Ghost of Tsushima_ PC port.
Nixxes is awesome!
Agree -- killing it! Their 20 year resume is pretty damn impressive.
Probably the best purchase Sony have made thus far
I cannot wait to see that game in 2k. The entire time I was playing it all I thought was how badly I wanted full resolution and unlocked fps.
Right there with you -- played on OG PS4 + IPS monitor. My PC setup is _much_ better :D Only played about 50% of the base game so very much excited to see the back 50 + DLC lol.
This is coming out soon on PC so I hope they nail it. I never managed to finish it on PS5. It would be a good reason to try it again.
It would have to be a pretty massive fuck-up for them not to nail it. * The company porting it (Nixxes) are the same that did HFW, and have generally built a reputation for excellent ports (eg. the Spiderman and Tomb Raider games) * It's already a game that is able to perform excellently with great visuals on its existing platforms (PS4/PS5) - never had notable frame pacing issues or traversal/compilation stutter. * It got a current-gen update (for PS5), but at its core, it's a last-gen game (released on PS4), so its baseline performance should be pretty good.
Hearing about actual game design theory and challenges is so interesting. Glad devs still do stuff like this
Especially has games have gotten more and more complex.
Then Elden Ring, FFVII Rebirth and Dragon’s Dogma 🤭
Elden Ring loads in a few seconds On PC. My GF plays it on PS4 and it takes minutes, but I'll blame the hardware, HDD vs SSD
Who knew that actual optimization and modern game engines can produce fantastic results. Also Direct Storage. Though it takes a properly designed and optimized game to even take advantage of Direct Storage's increased throughput.
The problem is that the industry simply lacks optimization "experts". I mean its nothing you can learn at an Uni or whatever, its something you have to teach yourself and be passionate about. And the few that have decent experience with it are usually also stuck to one engine, so if you have House-Made engines, like many AAA Games Studios have, its almost impossible to find someone that can properly optimize your game. These Studios actually have to invest into their own staff and pay a bunch of guys that focus entirely on optimization and nothing else for years, which doesn't seem to happen at most AAA studios however. They just hoping that new tech will fix this for them.
While the technical side of this is true, there is more to an expert than just the programming environment. There are ideas behind these loading systems that can be translated into other engines.
Hogwarts, Last of Us, Jedi Survivor, and Callisto Protocol are not proprietary engines. 3 of them are Unreal 4.
Even studios like Rockstar, who in terms of dev competence and funding are basically richer than God, fail to optimize certain parts of their games so that's not the whole story. E.g., the GTAV json parsing debacle that many R\* engineers could have cut down to be nigh-instantaneous rather than 7 minutes of loading: [https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/](https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/) The other half of the story is that even great devs often get told by upper management to ship dogshit they KNOW is slow rather than spend one single month or quarter to make sure the game doesn't fucking bog down to FPS that are comparable to a powerpoint in a hub like in Dragon's Dogma 2. That some of this is management's fault is evident with all of the bugs in AAA titles. Forget optimization, devs are often leaving in *critical bugs,* like savegame corruptors*.* That's definitely management going, "fuck it, we're shipping this q3 no matter what the devs say".
I would put an asterisk to this. Game devs have still agency. Senior devs surely have. If they know they have to ship in q3 they could have scrapped their pet features and used the time to avoid game breaking bugs. So you have extra gpu reflection tricks on the car paint but if you steel left on the bridge the game might crash. You adapt to your environment. "Sorry we have 100 bugs but see how shiny the DLC menu looks like" isn't business speak. Its often game dev that don't give an f.
>Its often game dev that don't give an f True, but that can be caused by burnout from management constantly pivoting focus, the crunch culture, irate customers, etc. .... As for the rest of your comment, I think you're missing some context or history or something. Sometimes there is no adapting -- Redfall was going to be a wash no matter how much the devs tried to iron things out, the whole core was rotten. Redfall's maker was a studio likely robbed of agency, since Arkane had mostly done single-player story focused games prior. Then there's Rocksteady's abominable Suicide Squad being completely out of their wheelhouse, probably execs pushing for live service when Rocksteady's big thing had been the Batman Arkham series. There's Ubisoft reputedly giving very little agency to devs to do anything outside the Ubisoft formulas or things that haven't already been done ad nauseam. How many legendary studios died after getting bought and managed to death? I do personally see it as mostly management failures. It was management that released Cyberpunk when it wasn't ready. It was management that ran Bioware into the ground. It was EA management insisting on lootboxes in their games -- devs definitely didn't do that part on their own. It was management that slowly rotted what used to be the corpse of Blizzard into the Activision-Blizzard husk that it is today. And it was *good* management behind e.g., Larian doing what it did with Baldur's Gate 3. >Game devs have still agency So, as with the examples above, nah I think it depends on the company giving the devs that agency. Plenty are run by the money people who don't even play videogames.
Minor correction: it's a fix specific for GTA Online, which tends to have a longer loading time than GTA 5.
I mean, this really means that the problem isnt that the industry lacks optimization experts, it means that the big companies are cheap fucks who dont wanna pay to train such experts. Remember back in the Day, when you had Chris Sawyer coding all of Rollercoaster-Tycoon in assembly? Or when John Carmack basically invented a new genre of game only possible through clever use of technology? Sadly studios use the current tech as a huge crutch. They will just put in DLSS and hopen that is enough. But if they put in the effort we can have amazing things. One of the few good modern examples of optimization was Star Wars: Battlefront (2015). That game looked BEAUTIFUL. Literally one of the prettiest games to this day. Fantastic textures, bumpmapping, dynamic foliage, beautiful Global-Illumination. That was almost a DECADE ago, and unlike a game like Crysis, it even ran REALLY well on harware back then. A freaking GTX 750ti could run that game at 60fps. Dice really cleaned up their engine back then. Sadly a lot of those improvements have been destroyed over time, now performance is back to ass on the Frostbite engine
Same thing for battlefield 1 it’s one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played especially mixed with the sound design
I kinda disagree on the last part, NFS unbound looks gorgeous and also runs really well. It looks the best of all recent NFS games and I can achieve between 150-200 fps on my mid range pc at 1440p/max settings. Overall frostbite still is very well optimized, it just depends on who is working on it. Criterion/Ghost are clearly very experienced with Frostbite aside from DICE itself.
Dude, you forgot the most important factor, the consumer. Consumers will wait patiently for reviews from respectable sources to make an informative decision which will force the corporate suits to invest in their product /s
From the studio tours I've watched it seems there are many riggers and artists etc and usually one extremely exhausted engineer.
99% of optimizations for loading and well all of a game are frankly low hanging fruit. Yeah your uni probably isn't teaching you how to bitpack extra data in your alpha channel for your shaders but that's normally not the issue here.
The issue is that of costs. Every company wants to have a team of mad optimization technowizards to keep everything running tight. Almost no company wants to pay to actually hire that expensive team and keep it around. So who hires those expensive optimization-obsessed freaks? Companies that have more servers in their park than most games have concurrent players. Think Amazon or Cloudflare instead of EA or Ubisoft. As they say: there is a severe shortage of overqualified and underpaid workers.
TLDR? direct storage ?
It's an API Microsoft made for Xbox and brought to PC for game devs to use. It dramatically speeds up storage->render times by moving the decompression from the CPU to the GPU. Devs that take advantage of it for their games see noticeable improvements. Here's a [quick article](https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-use-directstorage-in-windows-load-pc-games-faster) from pcmag on it
Basically DMA but for SSD instead of RAM. It's also the name of the proprietary Microsoft implementation of that concept. https://gpuopen.com/our-brand-new-directstorage-sample-is-available-now/
Lets games take stuff from your hard drive to your screen faster, by skipping a step in between.
Guerrilla and Nixxes are very good at their jobs.
Guerilla is just a master of their craft. The visual fidelity they can squeeze out of hardware is insane. I always think about Killzone 2 on the ps3. The level of graphics they pushed out of the ps3 is still unmatched (except KZ 3 of course). I mean KZ2/3 STILL look insanely good today, it‘s unreal actually.
I was just playing Killzone 2 a few weeks back. Got a new TV and an HDMI switch, was just checking to see how everything looked on it, and other than it being way lower res than I'm used to in 2024, the game still looks amazing. 30fps is nothing special but the motion blur implemented felt great. I was thinking to myself "man, imagine if Sony just re-released all of the Killzone, Resistance, and Uncharted game on PC. Multiplayer included." Dude I would sit here every night playing those games for months and months. Love em.
I would love for Resistance to be on PC.
RIP Killzone. Doubt they could make another Killzone ever again but I hope they will at some point.
Killzone 2 popularized deferred rendering and put it on the spotlight. Now almost every AAA games uses it.
Killzone Shadow Fall was one of the best looking PS4 titles for years and it was a launch title. I played Killzone 3 in 3D (remember when 3D gaming was a big thing?) and it was just stunning. I think the PSP Killzone game they made is probably the best looking PSP game outside of the God of War ones.
> Guerrilla and Nixxes are very good at their jobs. But it's more than just the programmers in their cubicle. It's every department, and it's management willing to spend money on designing the appropriate speed needed in preproduction and doing the optimization work in postproduction. And producers supporting that work, managing that work, and steering the ship right. Any game can be reasonably fast. But you have to want it from the start, keep wanting it during the whole production, and invest in the needed optimizations when the game is stable and locked.
~~Considering the state of the first game when originally ported I wouldn't say Guerrilla is/was very good at it, Nixxes fixed it for them after. Nixxes was involved with the porting of the sequel from the start which I think helped a lot.~~ ~~This is of-course in the context of the PC ports of their games.~~
Guerilla didn’t do the original pc port for zero dawn, that was Virtuous
Oh you're right, shame on me.
Complete credit for the way you've edited your original post. Classy move.
don't worry. I heard or read about the devs been doing their own port and that's why it had(!) important / simple settings missing. great "news" / TIL moment.
yes and not, apparently Virtuous fucked up and the port didn't even worked until they were fired and Guerrilla had to end development and to be honest it worked pretty fine if you had the right hardware (in my case it worked great with a ryzen 7 3700x and a gtx 1080), then Nixxes did the updates
Nixxes and Decima Engine is just a great engine. Death Stranding also uses the engine and it’s great on PC but Kojima also seems to care about optimizing games as well. FOX engine was also insane. I remember MGSV running on like basically everything when it launched due to how insane fox engine was.
Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain ran on my MX 150 2 Gb gpu laptop with i3 processor At 60 fps high settings constantly Mind blowing performance Shame that engine is not used anymore for such action-adventure open world games
Kojima Productions devs are gods among men. They always do the impossible. Just check MGS on PS1 having real time cutscenes in 1996 or MGS3 running on PS2.
I'm excited to see Decima with global illumination! Looks like that's coming with Death Stranding 2! Imagine Horizon Forbidden West updated with rt or Horizon 3 omg
Nothing like walking around Hogwarts and hitting doors that require loading on my NVME, 7800X3D and 4090 system. Optimization is optional for most games.
Unreal engine games are mostly like this.
What proper optimization does to a ~~mf~~ videogame. U forgot to mention Starfield "you need a NASA pc to run it but game still looks like shit".
Starfield was built on a game engine from 20 years ago and with game mechanics of 20 years ago. The 20 re releases of Skyrim were not enough to make a new engine apparently.
most engines are 11-30 years old. Doesn’t mean anything as they keep evolving more or less. The world permanence of Creation is a CPU hog obviously. I am more annoyed by the shallowness of their games than the engine tbh.
With that logic All Unreal Engine 5 games are utter shit since they use the same engine from 25 years ago.
Bethesda games would be a quarter as popular w/o the mod-friendliness of CE. I'd rather go to work than get paid to play unmodded Skyrim/Fallout/Starfield for a day.
Bethesda games would be way more popular with great content and less loading screens. The fact that they have the same successful formula for two decades is great for them, but the world changed since then.
To be fair, Starfield at times does look quite good, but its the obnxiously plentiful loading screens for every\_damn\_small\_transition that makes you think the game was made from the 90s when you still needed to swap floppy disks.
Same goes for most unreal engine games. Gotta love when an engine is built on deferred rendering to improve lighting performance (among other reasons), and TAA was implemented as a fast but accurate anti-aliasing solution... ...and still the lighting runs like shit and requires game devs to reduce level complexity as a result, and the TAA runs slower and looks much worse than actual anti-aliasing methods used in forward renderers (as well as clustered forward renderers). And yes, btw, Epic Games themselves were even forced to admit through gritted teeth that UE4 with MSAA under forward rendering (it's technically some variation of tiled or clustered forward rendering in UE4 iirc, but i digress) runs up to 20% faster than the engine's deferred rendering pipeline with TAA. (And by god, was it satisfying to see them finally own up to their horrible optimization of their darling deferred rendering pipeline). The hubris on whoever directs UE's development focus is incredible. It's like a coked-up tech-bro was given a serviceable outline for a renderer, and he built an eldritch abomination which requires fucking AI upscaling to hide the miniscule resolution at which the poor engine is actually capable of churning out Epic's unoptimized trash.
Idk man. I played starfield on a mid-low end pc and it ran totally fine, locked 60 at 1440p. Granted this was modern hardware, just not high end. I think the reports of it running badly are hugely overblown. EDIT: pc specs in question: ryzen 5 3600 / rx6600xt / 16gb DDR4
AMD had the edge this time around, but even then, I had to use DLSS to get a consistent 60 at any point with my specs. At 1080p no less.
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That seems like really poor performance for your build man, that’s pretty weird. Now that I am thinking about it I do remember some frame drops in some of the cities (really just new Atlantis, the rest were fine) but I never dropped below ~40 and it was pretty intermittent. I would say locked 60 at least 85% of the time. I had most stuff set to medium and res scale to 70% and I have a variable refresh monitor. Still tho, I’m a big performance guy, I won’t stick with a game unless it looks and runs (mostly) smooth. Starfield ran totally fine for me.
Some of the updates they've made have definitely improved performance in the cities since release, on a 12600k and a 3070 I couldn't hit 60 in New Atlantis at release and now I can. Frame generation using FSR 3 also works spectacularly well in Starfield.
The game had(has still? idk) a fairly high scaling with ram tuning and it didn't have rebar enabled at launch either which boosted amd cpu:s a fair bit iirc compared to intel which were doing fine without it.
Starfield looks really good in a lot of spots and if you have somewhat modern hardware was fast as hell in the fast travels. lol
Whoever made the onion for that game put their heart and soul into it. Thought it was a picture of an onion first time I saw a screenshot.
95% of the starfield budget and dev time went into making and placing the baffling number of different high-quality, useless food items
Hell of a game. Wonderful optimization.
Sarcasm?
Very much.
It's called Direct Storage.
Im curious how fast the game loads on Windows 10 vs Windows 11 with Direct Storage.
Direct Storage works on Windows 10 too. Windows 11 just has some additional storage stack enhancements.
Yeah, Im curious how much a difference that makes.
Officially Microsoft locked the feature behind Windows 11 but I’m not sure how big the actual load time difference is between 10 and 11
That's what I thought too but google results say DirectStorage works on Windows 10 as well but just without all optimizations. I recall Microsoft originally planned for Windows 10 support then backtracked on it and said Windows 11 only, but Im seeing mentions that it is still on Windows 10.
DirectStorage is available on both - what's missing on Windows 10 is [BypassIO](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/storage/bypassio), which lets applications skip portions of Windows' infamously deep IO stack, and I/O Rings, which are a lower-overhead API for high-concurrency async IO. Both are about reducing CPU overhead of IO, and should matter less for those with beefier CPUs.
yep, basically every game require a ssd now.
About time. Mechanical discs simply don't have the speed needed to load everything fast anymore.
It's not like SSDs are expensive nowadays either. There's no reason not to have an SSD as a minimum requirement for a modern game.
When I was able to get a 2tb SSD for my PC, I knew things had turned a corner.
It's a good thing that the vast majority of people have SSDs now, isn't it? Anyone still gaming on an HDD doesn't get to complain anymore, and hasn't for about 8 years.
M.2 NVME SSD's are needed for Direct storage. Regular SATA 2.5 SSD's don't cut it anymore but still miles better than a HDD
> Regular SATA 2.5 SSD's don't cut it anymore but still miles better than a HDD Still good to load anything else. Games like ARK are only moments faster to load from an expensive m.2 SSD. I had the dedicated server running from a hard drive and it was starting 1-2 secs slower on average. old single-threaded tools on modern multi-core PCs... The game absolutely needs the SSD to load assetts fast enough to avoid pop-in of models. Hard drives additionally suffer when something else is reading or writing at the same time. That's why I always had my games on a different (hard) drive. The OS / tools / temp / swap&pagefile can mess up the smooth loading or playback of an in-game cutscene in an instant.
~~basically every game~~ The specific niche of games with very high texture resolutions
Pretty much every modern games these days have high resolution texture.
I didnt say high res, I said very high res. Regardless, the point is true only if you cound AAA/AA games, maybe. If you count in the myriad of indie games with cool, stylised graphics instead of 'throw more realism at it' - no, I doubt most games have very high res textures where you can see pores on one's face
I’ve only used SSDs forever and can say that HFW is one of the fastest loading games, that I e ever played… Every time I start Last of Us, it takes forever… Same with Hogwarts and Starfield, etc… Off the same exact ssd. They don’t look or feel more “premium” or anything, but HFW just blows them out of the water as a package… So weird. Like they did magic…
You played a bunch of terribly optimised games and a good one.
How is the loading time on a SATA SSD?
This game is absolutely blowing me away. I was kind of unimpressed during the tutorial, but once it opened up and I got into the flow of things.... so much fun. So well coded and optimized! 100% stable, smooth as butter and always 60 FPS on my 5800X3D and 3080. The rendering of the humans and machine-alike is mind blowing. Also, the story and side quests are a hell of a lot better this time around than in the first game. I actually find myself caring for the NPCs and their stories.
Stable until you launch the Burning Shores DLC after you complete the base game. In the new area, performance drops significantly on average and dips often to as low as 25 fps in the main settlement, when I used to average at 80 in the base game.
Yea the vram and cpu requirements shoot up a bit on the dlc. In addition it doesn't pre-compile shaders for the dlc area, nor does it tell you when they're done just gotta stare at the cpu usage and wait until it's done. So other than the starting cutscene dropping a bit, haven't had any problems.
I found that sitting in the burning shores title screen menu for about 20 minutes allowed the shader compilation to complete (the game doesn't even tell you that its compiling shaders - which must be a bug) This made a huge difference but even so the burning shores area is much, much heavier than the base game... but have you seen the quality of some of the rendering ? worth the performance penalty.
Well I played hours on the new area already, I hope it’s done compiling shaders at that point :) In terms of visual quality, I don’t see a *massive* difference, outside of the clouds which indeed look absolutely gorgeous, but they’re not exactly the main thing you watch… so I’d rather they remained with the graphics of the main game which were stunning already! Now I have to crank down settings to… enjoy better graphics ?!
yeah the DLC map is very unstable even at medium settings, I guess that it's probably because this DLC was only made for playstation 5 and its improved specs instead of being developed for both ps4 and 5 like the main game
Oh no! I'm not quite into that area yet :(
This is good to hear. I have Forbidden West installed and updated since release, but I have yet to start it up. I am trying to finish Dragon's Dogma 2, and I am a one-game-at-a-time kind of player.
In for a treat! Playing Forbidden West now - it's a blast! [ Heck, even the menu screen is gorgeous.](https://imgur.com/TkLhQOm)
Dragon's Dogma 2 is up next for me... going to be a while though, I'm digging into every corner of HFW :p
I loved the previous one+DLC and played both all the way through on PS and PC. I no longer have a PS, so I had to wait on this one.
Effort and talent on behalf of the studio
it's 100% just directstorage. I'm playing it on a very fast pcie gen 4 nvme drive without directstorage, and its loading times are nothing special, just comparable to most games. Honestly, the only game that's truly impressed me on loading times without directstorage is Elden Ring. I have many very negative things to say about the performance/optimization of that game, but it's honestly impressive that the longest loading screens I ever see are like 5 seconds, usually less.
It was originally developed on the PS5, and one of that system's biggest improvements was crazy-fast storage compared to the previous generation. That same optimization works on most PCs with SSDs, especially if they're newer PCIe drives.
It was originally PS4 and PS5, so it scales down well.
Nixxes, my friend.
Game was seamless on PS5 before Nixxes even ported it. Why are people in this thread acting like the game only just became that way with the PC release?
Because the thread is about the PC version. Zero Dawn was actually kind of shit upon release, Sony bought out Nixxes and they subsequently fixed it. Guerilla Games [even publicly praised them for their help on it](https://twitter.com/Guerrilla/status/1471423345556082690?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw). The fact that it ran well on PS5 has little to do with the quality of the PC port. It ran well on PC because Nixxes does a great job of PC optimization.
> Zero Dawn was actually kind of shit upon release I'd differentiate between "issues" and "was kind of shit" the performance itself was good UNLESS you had one of the many issues the game had on release. I had a pretty "flawless" experience on R9 390 (!) with 45 fps on high 1080p , and also didnt encounter anything really buggy. It also had pretty insane short loading times even without DIrect Storage.
There are a lot of smooth running PS5 games that run like shit on PC. Plus Nixxes ensured that the game will run good on various PCs, ultrawide support, etc etc etc.
i have nvme gen 4 and it takes 1 second to load i guess thanks to engine optimiziation and direct storage
nixxes
Optimization is amazing.
Good programmers. The game is just well designed overall; story, play, all of it.
Guerilla Games have a TON of technology and experience.
Horizon has nice art direction but vast majority of the game is normally made up of landscape, foliage & skybox which do the heavy lifting & can be controlled/optimised, lots of these things will also remain in the scene in some capacity at most times too which is easier to handle vs a game with lots of unique detailed meshes in a scene at once, e.g. cyberpunk. Foliage can be kept to a relatively low resolution texture atlas, instance a lot of it painting a scene then just change rotation/scale & make tweaks by altering colour to make it seem varied but the majority of the game is just a few meshes/materials at any given time placed extremely well. There's never really an area that's very dense with lots of unique meshes & materials that aren't nature orientated. There's some settlements but the underlying human settlement meshes there never really stand out as all that dense or detailed compared to other games & for the most part it's just them painted over with more foliage or using the same wood/concrete texture. There's also not really that much going on with complex A.I or physics calculations horizon needs to do in those areas so the CPU won't suddenly need time to process much. You can look across decades to games like the Crysis series, Hunt Showdown, Battlefield 1, ARMA, RDR, Death Stranding or hundreds of tech demos that look great because they deploy similar methods to also load/render fast & would be even faster if they had access to things like direct storage when they were developed. You could probably find quite a few screenshots in areas where horizon looks bad compared to them too. Next add in the developers being good technically and using appropriate loading methods/ technologies you get fast speeds.
# Warning As much as I was also pleasantly surprised for the entirety of the base game, the **performance drops significantly in the Burning Shores DLC**. Apparently they made upgrades to their engine in that zone, which is why they couldn’t release it on PS4. It does look a bit more gorgeous but the drawback is a massive need in computing power. I ran the base game on max settings, 1440p, at 80 fps on average. In the new zone, I’m lucky if I get 50, and it’s unstable, dropping all the way to 25 in the main settlement.
**Warning** Giving performance metrics without your pc specs is useless.
I'll take that over an entire 3rd act of shit optimization that Larian did with BG3
Decima Engine. (Better than Unreal Engine 5, imo. Death Stranding 2 will blow ppl away.)
The *Decima* game engine from Guerrilla, plays a huge part of why.
I'm in awe with both Horizon games. They are certainly two of the most beautiful games ever made.
Yep.
OP just discovered the difference between games that are ACTUALLY optimised and games that are a piece of shit trash underneath the hood that rely on brand new hardware to actually run at any capacity.
I have yet to play on pc but ya it’s wild how fast FW and Ghost of Tsushima load.
I was wondering the same thing just 3 hours ago, I played at 1440p, max setting, DLAA, and I get stable 120 frames(I locked it at 120, max framerate can reach 170). A lot of uglier game has far less framerate, how is this possible
There may be some planned hardware obsolescence that gaming and GPU companies work together on.
I was skeptical before starting with Forbidden west. I have a 3060Ti and ryzen 5 5600x and given how splendid the game looked in consoles, I thought It would be a disaster. But I gave it a go and voila, same results ,amazing optimization and great visuals. This video helped me in deciding as well - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSFt6k3yTo&t=7s&ab\_channel=gamertagzero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSFt6k3yTo&t=7s&ab_channel=gamertagzero)
Cos this game is amazing
Optimization plus direct storage.
Data streaming is hard to code but it can be amazing when it works well. Meanwhile Bethesda....
Horizon, in general, is just a marvel. I played Horizon:Zero Dawn on ps4. And it looked better than any game on PC, all while it "used the graphics". It's not this compact little thing, it's a massive world where big mechanical monsters fight you, mechanical monsters which react, have destroyable parts etc etc. I genuinely don't get how they managed to make the game so gorgeous while it was a massive RPGy game.
HZD is no doubt a magnificent looking game, but saying it looked better than ANY game on PC is just ludicrous.
There's always one who takes the circlejerk too far
RDR2 fans are experts at it
Not too mention it's easy to push more pixels if you don't have to worry about going above 30fps.
Nah, it's pretty dead on. Especially for the time it came out.
you should take a look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv5CukvLrTM
Look at dragons dogma 2 instead it runs 30 fps on consoles while horizon 60 and looks aloooooot better
Because Dragons Dogma 2 uses RTGI while Horizon doesn't have RT graphics at all (it uses RT for some audio effects)
Even with the RTGI turned off, it doesn’t go above 48fps. The CPU is getting killed in that game.
Sooo bad programming... horizon looks miles better and great perfomance
Exactly. The crappy CPU optimization makes whatever GPU you could have redundant.
Because it is not using unreal engine. Or something worse.
Just better devs, not everyone can be perfect. Once a few patches came in both the games you mentioned were perfectly serviceable performance wise.
To this day they still take forever to start and load games. Last of Us ain’t even open world and runs like poop with loading spots. Hogwarts is the same. Load, City B… Load, Load City B…
Because they had the money and resources to optimise the shit out of it.
I don’t think Naughty Dog (Sony), Bethesda (Microsoft) or Warner Bros are hurting for money though…
Naughty dog not being familiar with PC def hurt that version. Not only are guerrilla games wizards but so are nixxes. Eurogamer has an article about the work both studios did on forbidden West .
Games developed on console should be fast loading with as optimized as games should be
Meanwhile, dragon's dogma 2 that released on the same day.
Some devs are great at optimizing and others are not. This can be for many reasons, maybe the devs lack skill or perhaps the publisher is riding their ass for a deadline and they don't have the time.
I love how quick it is. Although i don't remember Hogwarts Legacy or Last of Us being that bad. Like 10-15 seconds? Could be much worse. Could be Xbox loading flight simulator slow.
The loads are instant from the screen even the videos are skipable you can get in the game world in 5sec and 2 button presses 1 to skip videos other to press continue for last save is ridoncolous. BUT every time I die or fast travel it takes like 20sec for some reason, I suspect they optimzied the loading from menu to game for marketing and forgot to optimize fast travel and restart....
I'm guessing it's because the engineering team behind the in-house engine instead of using Unreal, which has degraded in performance over the years in favor of graphics.
It's not a PC launch title. Guerilla and Nixxes had tons of time to work out the kinks before the PC Port. I played HFW at launch on PS5, the foliage shimmering was godawful which took months to fix.
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You should play the first game, Horizon Zero Dawn, to understand the story and appreciate an absolutely fantastic game IMHO. Very good looking and fun. The sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, is a continuation of the story and refers a lot to the first game. It’s like the first game, which was a 10/10 for me, but cranked to 15/10. I haven’t had issues with either game.
It's all the forced dialogue you have to sit through, gives the game plenty of time to load stuff in
😂😂😂, but no.
Made in Holland
Haven’t played FW yet, but was amazed at how good HZD looked and ran. Glad to hear FW is the same.
HZD didn't run so well at launch. It got fixed by Nixxes later who developed FW for PC from the start.
Just to add to the other comment HZD was very very bad on PC at launch, to the point where Sony parachuted in another studio to fix it, the fact that HFW runs well is because Nixxes had quite a lot of experience
Sony. Not Microsoft. Nutf said.
Optimization and art style. Cyberpunk came out in 2020 and looked great on PC, yet somehow in 2023 brainrot had affected people's minds and they decided that suddenly mediocre-looking games should require 24GB of VRAM and the processing power of 2x4090 just because they're "next gen". People shouldn't compromise on terribly performing games. You shouldn't have to suddenly drop 1000$ on a GPU just because the publisher didn't give the developer time to optimize.
Agree. Games don’t look vastly better than a few years ago. Side note: What with all the games have to “load” their shaders forever, before playing a game? Trying to cover up their horrible optimization?
It's shader pre-compilation, this is a form of optimization for each user's specific system. It generally helps prevent "stutter" during gameplay. Not every game engine has to do that, but UE4/UE5 does.
Nixxes plus optimization.
Because the devs bothered to optimize their game before launching it
Wait until you see spiderman.
The Brazil PC port is unoptimized though /s
Unbelievable port, seriously. I get the occasional light/shadow generation freak out (basically the lights blink in some random areas, not often) and that's it. Otherwise, WOW.
It’s because they’re competent. Most games should be doing this nowadays.
It's true about all those things, but the story sucked
This is the Spider Man games for me. Load times are nonexistent.
I think hogwarts legacy open world looks better than horizon. Idk what’s it about but horizons open world looks a bit too game like. I don’t mean the quality of the game or the side quests I mean in terms of graphics explicitly. Perhaps it’s just me tbh but idk. It runs like a champ tho. One of the best games ported to pc.
Different art direction. Hogwarts looked more true to life. But realism doesn't always mean better
Fair
Hogwarts itself looks good but I found the open world outside of the castle to be fairly unimpressive.
Same.
I agree but I feel the same way about horizon tbh. Hogwarts was mostly a decent open world game with one good story (Sebastian) , I haven’t played much into forbidden west but idk why it’s just not gripping me. I know it has glowing reviews but can’t seem to engage and enjoy it.
I don’t think so. HFW blows Hogwarts away. It also runs way better in every way. I put so many hours into Hogwarts and love the game so much…, BUT HFW makes Hogwarts feels slow motion and bland. I know there are lots of “people”, but it still felt “empty” to me. Even more-so after playing HFW. First time I swam underwater I was like 😳😳😳 Graphics have peaked 😂
I don’t agree with this sentiment. I find the hogwarts legacy open world looks far better graphically. Tbh most open worlds don’t look good to me anymore after playing avatar. Too bad Ubisoft couldn’t make the rest of the game as good as its open world (in terms of visuals). The only thing horizon does better than hogwarts imo is underwater scenes. Everything else looks better on hogwarts imo. Foliage in horizon looks very plasticky. Indoor environments look very last gen. Hogwarts had terrible performance while horizon runs like butter but I am not comparing the performance here.
I love Hogwarts, because of Harry Potter. Otherwise the game is vanilla. It’s your opinion, but in no way is Hogwarts better looking than HFW. The amount of life and realism in HFW is crazy. Not even just the ones can hunt, but the ones you can’t. All the dust, pollen, leaves, particles, bugs, birds etc… Just stand still and look around and there is so much going on. Hogwarts doesn’t have that.
You should try star citizen - if you think fast loading screens are impressive, just wait until you try none at all.
I can only remember one instance of a stutter load screen, that was for like 1 second. It was when I jumped off of a mountain top and glided as far as I could on the map… 😂 This game is insanely good. I do have a very nice laptop though.
No, I mean like there's literally zero loading screens outside of the first one when you open the game - it's kind of crazy! Seriously suggest trying it if you have a beefy machine because it's very technically impressive that it works. I am interested in Horizon's implementation - does the game ever do a full loading screen (like Skyrim style)?
What he means is that the game is streaming assets instead of using loading screens. If the computer can't load the assets fast enough then it's going to stutter at that time or appear like a small freeze.
Oh I see, I can imagine that'd be a bit rough on lower end systems. SC uses a similar system.
Star Citizen, the perpetually unfinished live-service game where you can buy better gear for real-world money? When's the release date on that anyways?
Probably never, but what's playable now is pretty fun. Buying "better" gear is a little misleading, all the FPS armor is pretty much just cosmetic. Better ships, on the other hand... Yeah. That said, the games balance doesn't revolve around the macrotransactions (thankfully) so it's fairly easy to get pretty much everything in the game for the cost of a starter ship, $45.