Sony and their in-house PC port specialists at Nixxes Software have confirmed the PC specs required for Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, with a detailed breakdown for the absolute minimum, medium, high and very high graphical presets.
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is coming to PC on 21st March, having originally released for PS4 and PS5 in early 2022.
Across the board you’ll need 16GB of RAM and 150GB of SSD storage space, while it’s the mid-range and older GeFore RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 5700 GPUs that you’ll want for 1080p at 60FPS, which is still such a sweet spot for PC gaming. Anything better than that, and you’ll need a GPU that cost you more than a PS5. The GeForce RTX 3070 and Radeon RX 6800 are in that “PS5 equivalent” class, able to deliver either 1440p at 60FPS or 4K at 30FPS.
While CPU core counts and speeds are important, the main focus here will be on the GPU. At the very lowest end you’ll need either an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 or an AMD Radeon RX 5500XT. Both are 2019 vintage cards, with the goal being of providing 720p at 30FPS performance. What’s interesting to note is that both are a generation newer than what was the recommended spec for hitting 1080p 60FPS in Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC port – the GeForce GTX 1060 and the very PS4 Pro-like Radeon RX 480 – but their performance brackets are a bit different. The GTX 1650 is actually a weaker card than the GTX 1060, while the RX 5500XT is a bit stronger than the RX 480.
That’s still a bit odd when Horizon Forbidden West was a cross-gen release that also launched on base PS4, isn’t it? Well, the simple answer is down to drivers. While Nvidia’s 10 series is still supported with drivers, it only has access to older GPU functions of the time which can lead to lesser performance – the GTX 1650 is part of the 20 series, just without the first generation ray tracing components – while AMD has cut off everything before the 5000 series Radeon cards from driver support. Focussing on newer cards can also ease the amount of optimisation that’s needed.
Naturally the game is being upgraded and enhanced to make the most of PC and GPU specific features. There’s support for ultra-wide resolutions for 21″9 and 32:9 screens, all the way up to a ludicrous sounding 48:9 aspect ratio for those with a triple-monitor set up. Then there’s unlocked frame rates, and all the major upscaling technologies including AMD FSR, Intel XeSS and Nvidia DLSS 3 (which will support frame generation). The port will also make use of DirectStorage for fast loading times – hence the SSD requirement.
Helping to tune performance and fidelity will be individual quality settings for textures, level of detail, shadows, water, terrain and more, and you can use sliders to adjust the field of view and visual effects like motion blur and film grain. There will also be toggles to adjust full screen effects like radial blur, lens flares, bloom and vignette, with a lot of these heavy post processing effects able to draw a gamer’s ire.
Horizon Forbidden West is a fantastic sequel. In our review, Tuffcub said, “Horizon Forbidden West improves upon Zero Dawn in almost every aspect. The story is particularly well written and ebbs and flows from air punching highs to dark, horrific lows. Like later Jurassic Park movies it suffers from the fact that we’ve already seen massive robotic dinosaurs on our TVs, the wow factor is reduced, and that the puzzles, crafting, and RPG elements could have been lifted from any number of games. Even so, it’s still a spectacular robo-beast smack down and thoroughly enjoyable to play.”
