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Horizon Forbidden West finally made its PC debut very recently, giving PC players the chance to experience one of PlayStation's most visually stunning titles on their platform of choice. Developed by Nixxes Software, a studio with a strong portfolio of PlayStation PC ports, Horizon Forbidden West on PC had a rather smooth and polished release, something that's very rare for PC ports nowadays.
While the PC port of Horizon Forbidden West was released with no major issues, it isn't entirely immune to some performance and stability-related quirks, especially for low or medium-spec PC configurations. Fortunately, the game offers a host of graphical options for players to tweak and experiment with to get the desired balance between performance and visuals.
Here's a comprehensive optimization guide for Horizon Forbidden West on PC, including the best settings that you can use for optimal performance without having to compromise on the game's visuals.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinion.
Optimized settings for Horizon Forbidden West on PC
I tested Horizon Forbidden West on a Ryzen 5 5600 system, with RX 6600XT GPU, 16 GB RAM, and with the game installed on a Gen-4 NVMe SSD. I also had AMD Smart Access Memory (SAM) enabled, with the game also making use of Microsoft DirectStorage. During my testing, I found a few settings that impacted performance the most.
These are - Texture Quality, Shadow Quality, Level of Detail, and Parallax Occlusion Mapping. Surprisingly, the Cloud Quality option, which governs volumetrics, doesn't seem to affect performance that much. That being said, here are my optimized settings for smooth 1080p 60fps gameplay:
Display:
- Window mode: Exclusive Fullscreen
- Display resolution: 1920x1080
- Aspect ratio: Auto
- Cinematic letterboxing: On
- Refresh rate: Native to your display's refresh rate
- VSync: Off
- NVIDIA Reflex low latency: Off
- Dynamic range: As per preference
- Color blind mode: As per preference
- Dynamic resolution scaling: Off
- Anti-aliasing: TAA
- Upscale method: Off
- Upscale quantity: Off
- DLSS frame generation: Off
Graphics:
- Preset: Custom
- Texture quality: High (Use Low for 4GB VRAM, Medium for 6GB VRAM, and Very High for more than 8GB VRAM)
- Texture filtering: 16x Anisotropic
- Shadow quality: Medium
- Screen space shadows: On
- Ambient occlusion: SSAO
- Screen space reflections: High
- Level of detail: Medium
- Hair quality: High
- Crowd quality: High
- Terrain quality: High
- Water quality: High
- Clouds quality: High
- Translucency quality: Default
- Parallax occlusion mapping: Off
- Field of view: As per preference
- Depth of field: High
- Bloom: On
- Motion blur strength: As per preference
- Sharpness: Default
- Lens flares: On
- Vignette: As per preference
- Radial blur: On
- Chromatic aberration: On
You can also turn on DLSS for a more stable framerate, but I won't recommend using AMD FSR here since it can introduce ghosting as well as upscaling artifacts with very minimal performance gain.
Horizon Forbidden West is a graphical powerhouse on PS5, and that also holds true for the PC port. However, the graphical fidelity of the game comes at a price, i.e., performance. While the game does offer plenty of options to help you tweak its performance, it also requires a capable enough PC to make sure you can actually run it in the first place.
Here are the minimum and recommended system requirements for Horizon Forbidden West:
Minimum:
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Processor: Intel Core i3-8100 or AMD Ryzen 3 1300X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4GB or AMD Radeon RX 5500XT 4GB
- Storage: 150 GB available space
- Additional Notes: 150GB SSD Space
Recommended:
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-8600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 5700
- Storage: 150 GB available space
- Additional Notes: 150GB SSD Space
Funnily enough, the system requirements do mention a GTX 1650 being able to run the game, albeit at 720p 30fps. However, that does not take into consideration the massive framerate fluctuations during cutscenes, as well as the stutters that can often manifest while traversing through the open world.
While there is a dedicated shader compilation step when you first boot the game on your PC, it doesn't seem to eliminate all instances of shader-related stutters, at least not in the release version of the game.
Fortunately, the stuttering here isn't nearly as intrusive as something like The Last of Us Part 1's or Star Wars Jedi Survivor's PC port. However, it's still something that players should know about. The biggest issue the game currently has is the massive frame-time fluctuations that happen every time there is a cutscene, which can be very distracting.
