PS4: Horizon Zero Dawn Is A Techinical Masterpiece (Digital Foundry)

[aLkaLiNE]

Disclaimer!!!: This game had no patch yet but is technically flawless and, according to DF, the best implementation we've seen of the PS4 Pros extra hardware power ever. A day one patch is coming, but there isn't really anything to fix. It looks like Naighty Dog has some new competition for the wizardry crown.

...Also important is the consistency of performance during traversal in the open world. Producing a sandbox game of this scale is not an insignificant task - many similar titles struggle to maintain solid performance during traversal as the CPU needs to stream in and decompress open world data on the fly, while continuing to process game logic and prepare instructions for the GPU. It's for this reason that titles like Fallout 4 and Just Cause 3 can hitch and stutter when the player does nothing more than move from A to B through the environment. Crucially, Horizon Zero Dawn is immune to this issue - making your way through the open world is a super-smooth experience regardless of the PlayStation hardware you're using.


excellent performance at checkerboard 4K vs the native 1080p of the base PS4 version is a great achievement. While the Pro hardware has 2.3x the GPU power of the standard model, memory bandwidth hasn't scaled in step - and it's rare that we see a PS4 engine scale so gracefully between 1080p on base hardware and 4K on Pro (checkerboard or otherwise). That Guerrilla has achieved this with no impact to performance is impressive enough, but the team has pushed the envelope here, handing in more visual enhancements over the base version of the game.

While Horizon would be lauded for its resolution boost alone, what we like about the title's presentation is that Guerrilla has accepted that it's not just the pixel-count alone that matters - more is required to deliver a great 4K presentation. With that in mind, we were really happy to see improvements to resolution on some textures. Also worthy of praise is a marked increase in texture filtering quality. Lower levels of anisotropic filtering on base hardware can stand out on a 1080p image - but the effect is much more pronounced at 4K. Thankfully this is not an issue with Horizon.