Guerilla Games has issued an official statement about the issues that will plague the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn at launch. According to the team, some of the game’s animation will be locked at 30fps. Moreover, PC gamers may experience some stuttering issues in specific PC configurations.
Going into more details, Guerrilla claimed that some systems may experience a brief stutter during general world traversal, UI updates, quest updates, or camera swaps in cutscenes. Moreover, Anisotropic Filtering is not working in Horizon Zero Dawn. The team is currently looking into these issues and will most probably fix them via a future patch.
Regarding the 30fps animations, Guerrilla had this to say:
“Some animations are designed to only refresh at 30fps even if the game is running at a much higher frame rate.”
This is obviously an “optimization feature” that was present in the PS4 version. Unfortunately, we don’t know yet whether the team will be able to fix it. Still, the team is currently exploring how it can improve this with a future update
Additionally, and similarly to Detroit: Become Human, Horizon Zero Dawn will feature a Shader Compilation. According to Guerrilla, this can take an average of 10-15 minutes for most systems to complete. Once it’s completed, you won’t have to do it again unless you make a significant hardware change or update your video drivers.
Guerrilla also suggested using the NVIDIA GeForce 451.67 WHQL Driver or the AMD Radeon Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.8.1 Driver.
So yeah, apparently things are not looking good for the launch version of Horizon Zero Dawn.
The game releases on August 7th, and we’ll be sure to share our first performance impressions on launch day.

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I will chock this up to inexperience rather than incompetence since this is Guerrilla Games first proper PC game release after a very long time. I am sure they will improve the game with patches in the coming weeks.
They probably will eventually patch the game but there is no guarantee and anyway when a person knows that a game has issues that take away from enjoying the game then it only makes sense to wait until it’s finished after release.
What was their other PC release even :O I can’t remember a single PC game from them. Was it in 1994-99 time frame?
It was Shellshock: Nam ’67, which was released on September 3, 2004. So almost 16 years ago.
Hm, never heard of that 1. Gotta google it i guess. Long time ago indeed.
guerilla didnt even port it, they outsourced it to VIRTUOUS. A studio known for having a sh**ty a*s track record for porting.
I’m not too hopeful on the port. Durante said in his IGN analysis that some settings are kinda finicky.
Ars Technica’s said the game was really taxing on their 9900k and 2080 Ti.
pchardwaregamesDE has graphs that show that a 1060 barely plays the game at 60fps on low settings.
hahahahahah lol and its dx12 only yet its so unoptimized
Probably because denuvo..
10-15 minutes to compile shaders every time Nvidia/AMD release a drivers update? GTFO of here with such ridiculousness.
Yeah that’s nuts. I always hate when I boot up Dishonored 2 after a while and have to stare at that screen for 2 minutes while it recompiles all the shaders, 10-15 minutes is insane, new game-ready drivers are released every month.
I can’t speak for AMD but what’s more ridiculous is updating drivers because they more than ever break than fix anything. The game ready drivers these days don’t even provide a fps increase, only a stupid freestyle filter toggle which is not worth a 500 meg download which also disables any telemetry blockers one had added.
What a piece of shit.
You cant even spoil properly some of them are not accurate
Frustrated peasant
Lol, do you think anyone here cares about this shlt SJW game?
YOU CARE.. you took time out of your day to post a comment. You could have easily STFU and go on with your day. But nope..???
I can’t speak for AMD but what’s more ridiculous is updating drivers because they more than ever break than fix anything. The game ready drivers these days don’t even provide a fps increase, only a stupid freestyle filter toggle which is not worth a 500 meg download which only disables any telemetry blockers one had added.
Ouch!!!
When you’re playing a game at 100+ fps and see a 30fps animation it looks like stop motion. Truly awful.
“So yeah, apparently things are not looking good for the launch version of Horizon Zero Dawn.”
There is a simple solution to all of the problems described in the article. Don’t buy the game paying full price for it and struggle to get through it. Wait until the port is finished after it is released and if the developer doesn’t fix the issues then pass on buying it entirely.
Rushing to buy an unfinished port on release is just encouraging the same behavior from developers in the future.
Is there anything remarkable about this game that warrants rushing to pay full price for it to play it even knowing that the port is not ready for release?
Yup, this should have been done properly.
DX12 / Vulkan
DLSS 2.0
Uncapped framerates
Raw texture assets
It is the sad truth of our time that PC gamers who are enthusiastic and pay full price for launch access are treated to the worst product and at worst prices.
Not gonna be buying period after the price hike. The game now as stands for a 3 year old game is at the same price as Cyberpunk.
PC ports always get a price hike if they’re released later. It’s the norm.
Just wait until it is cheap/fixed. It’s a win win for those with patience.
It’s $45 for HZD. Cyberpunk is $60.
Maybe on your region not on mine.
Leave the third world?
Alex from Digital Foundry just detailed the litany of problems with the game and also stated that the 35GB update patch fixes none of those problems! smh
Amazing incompetence. Well, we will see what John has to say in his launch day performance impression tomorrow. I’ve got a feeling that it won’t be pretty and he’s running a 2080 Ti. So if that won’t perform decently then there’s no hope for the rest of us.
of course i wont buy it, i would rather choose Death Stranding for pc which is an excellent and flawless version of the game.
Is this with the day one patvh?
Why would they make a statement saying “Hey, a whole bunch of stuff are gonna suck at release” if said things would be fixed in the day 1 patch? It’s hardly good PR to basically trash talk your own game without reason. These issues will be there at release, and this is their attempt att preemptive damage control.
Two games (Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding) using the exact same game engine.
Death Stranding is sponsored by NVIDIA, is very well optimized and runs fantastically. Lots of people appear to be happy with the quality of the port.
Horizon Zero Dawn is sponsored by AMD, is very poorly optimized, stutters and runs poorly.
Hmmm…
I think we can safely assume that Death Stranding was developed with PC in mind pretty much from the get-go, while Horizon Zero Dawn was initially meant to be completely Playstation exclusive.
And what was it originally developed on.
Makes sense.
same engine?
Death Stranding and Horizon, yep. Both the same engine.
AMD sponsored games being well optimized? Well I remember Tomb Raider (2013) running poorly at launch on Geforce cards, with nvidia they did not have access to the game code because the dev was sponsored by amd. And we also had AMD’s attempt at having rendering locked in for their GPU only with their Mantle API.
LOL imagine paying 50 bucks for this. This should be 20 bucks at most considering the age and the lack of meaningful improvements for PC.
They should’ve build the PC version since day 1 even if its just for company archive. And yeah,like always,conslow holding back something again…
Easy to say that they “should have” in hindsight. Developing an additional version of a game that might never be released is hardly a good financial decision. It doesn’t just come at the push of a button.
They likely couldn’t have due to contract (they’re a Sony studio). The consoles didn’t hold the game back, the console literally made this game possible.
Doesn’t make the PC port any better, but you have to see the bigger picture.
This game was 1000% possible at any point in time, ever. Sony could have ordered it made, at any time, for PC, whether or not it was made for PS4. Console didn’t “make this game possible” at all.
Technically possible yes, but also against the best interests of Sony, who funded the development of the game to be a system seller. They make more money by getting people on their platform, so releasing it on PC early would literally defeat their reasoning for funding the game. So yeah, the console made this game possible. It’s basic business for consoles.
What a shame.
I guess Kojima had more experience and technical know-how in regards to building PC ports.
Genuinely thought that Death Stranding’s perfect performance was due to the Decima engine just being awesome.
Now it looks like its because Kojima and Co. are just good at their job.
KOJIMA games on the pc always ran perfectly, i give them that, Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain & Death Stranding run very smoothly and no problems
MGS1 and 2 were trainwrecks of PC ports
Because the pc ports of those games were not handled by kojima team but other developers
Mgs1 pc version was handled by microsoft game studios and Konami were not very cooperative with them in term of sharing assets.
Mgs2 substance was outsourced to Success on pc as for the consoles:both the ps2 and xbox version of this game did not have Kojima team handling it, as a result even the xbox port was bad,it ran worse than the ps2 version and the textures had colours banding issues.
Why every console port has to be crap? at least at first..
At this point the stuttering becomes a selling feature thing for PC platform !
LMAO
Horizon Zero Dawn PC stutter lag edition now available on Steam
Bad ports by lazy devs who can’t envision anything beyond 30/60FPS.
Disaster. Why conslow gamers hyping Guerilla Games so much? Looks like some B class developers.
yet they have the nerve to charge 2.5 times the cost of the normal MSRP of the PS4 version.
Death Stranding released couple weeks ago, and it uses an optimized DECIMA Engine, proper frame pacing, supports both FidelityFX CAS & the best implementation of DLSS 2.0, DX12, and it doesn’t require any 15min shader recompilation
they should have gone with build KOJIMA Studios used
Deep sale it is then.
https://media1.giphy.com/media/3rgXBOmTlzyFCURutG/giphy-downsized-medium.gif
“update your video drivers.”
So once a week or so then…
Why not fix the 30FPS animations? they got the full quality animations right? or they are so r-tarded they actually made only 30FPS animations.
You’d expect at the absolute bare minimum for them to at least use some form or interpolation to have the animations in question running perceptively at double-speed at 60fps.
I seem to remember that the fire animations in a recent Gears of War game also ran at a dire 30fps.
The halo mcc is plagued by issues like that with reach being the worst offender.
I’ve seen Bloodborne running with interpolation and it was sort of enough.
It’s puzzling how lazy modern devs became.
As usual, wait 6 months for price and patch 🙂
Amen !
Sounds like a joke and a mockery of PC gamers. I don’t understand why they didn’t postpone the release to repair the game like Death Stranding which is almost perfect.
Guerrila didn’t even do the port, they made one of the dumbest decisions: Joining with Virtuos.
And not even their Shanghai studio.
This is the team that couldn’t get Arkham Asylum 360 xbox game to run at 60 FPS on modern consoles plus other ports on nintendo switch.
Virtuos must be REALLY CHEAP to hire.
I have a strong feeling they don’t want it out anywhere near the new console launches. It would get minimal attention if released any later.
they gave the job to virtuous, known for being terrible at porting, they could not port arkham asylum to 60fps to current gen xbox one x and ps4 pro, they f*ked up the pc version of the arkham games on pc that had to be recalled, not a good track record at all. Why? beats me…maybe cause they are cheap as f*k. but guerilla games f*ked up badly outsourcing to some cheap a*s studio that is known for being terrible at porting.
There is a big patch incoming today. Stop crying
Stupidity has a name and is Leland Palmer.
You shame the name you use.
He’s just a TV character from a science fiction show, not an actual person. Get over it you idiot.
The point you missed (by your own stupidity I guess) is let’s wait for the day-one patch first before drawing conclusions and b*ching about how bad the port is.
Yeah, experts like you are the reason devs release unfinished programs.
Cause “tHe DaY oNe PaTcH ShOuLd FiX iT”.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
You’re not a clown, you’re the entire circus.
You simply don’t get it do you peabrain? Here, I’ll break it down for you: All I’ve said is wait for the patch first before passing judgement. I didn’t say the patch would necessarily fix the issues. This last bit is your own warped mentality. Which is indeed laughable.
Try harder, “jenius”.
Shader compilation? Are they selling ps3 game that works under emulator?? It do could explain that unoptimisation….
Not remotely surprising that Sony can’t get their generic game made for 8 year old hardware running well on PC.
Nobody cares about your “spoilers”, dirty peasant.
But you’re going to meet the ban hammer soon, I guarantee it.
Awww typical butthurt console peasant
dx12 only, unoptimized mess. Good job guys.
just so ppl know..guerilla games outsourced this port Virtuous. A studio known to be terrible at porting…very bad track record. Pretty sad. Kojima took the PC version very seriously for Death Stranding and it shows. Guerilla games just outsourced to some cheap a*s studio.
Console devs are like: Aniso-what?
That’s the job of the devs, who are charging for they product.
What a disaster.
is this game has a customize armor suit, just like in the western rpg games ??
ahh @ pc gaming sucks, im going to buy a ps5! * sony je je je
Not to defend them, but at least, they proactively admit this before launch!! Not like some other devs!
Sounds like a lazy port.
This is the Pc Super power kkkkkkkkkkkkkk Runing worse than Ps4 base
What do you expect when a game was made exclusively focused on extremely limited console hardware and then ported over to run on a high-end PCs?!!