Horizon Zero Dawn PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

CPU Performance – How Core-Hungry is Horizon?

We have told our readers before that the quad-core era is coming to an end, and Horizon Zero Dawn clearly shows this. Having hyperthreading on a quad-core processor deliver a significant increase in average and lower percentile framerates over SMT-less quad cores. Even so, having six or more cores appears to be ideal in our benchmarking area as it provides the most stable performance. 

PC players with quad-core processors will likely experience more stuttering than players with higher core/thread count CPUs. When playing Horizon Zero Dawn with 6 or 8 active cores, stuttering is a lot less frequent, highlighting the CPU demands of the game’s PC version. 

With PlayStation 4 operating with a 1.6GHz AMD Jaguar processor, it is strange to see CPU performance being a limiting factor. These performance limitations may be due to porting issues, as Horizon Zero Dawn wasn’t initially designed with PC in mind.