Horizon Zero Dawn PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Resolution Scaling (Does it work?)

Resolution Scaling is a great way to regain performance when running games at high resolutions, sacrificing sharpness to achieve higher framerates. Below we can see the performance impact of Horizon’s scaling settings, as well as some comparison images which will show you how much detail is lost when scaling images to higher resolutions. 

Sadly, Horizon: Zero Dawn’s Adaptive Scaling feature can be over-aggressive in some instances, sacrificing too much quality to hit its user-defined framerate target. While sometimes it uses reasonable scaling settings, in others Horizon can become much blurrier than necessary, especially if players are running the game with native resolutions of 1440p or lower. 

Our advice is to utilise static resolution scaling options if you need to. That said, players should first look at our optimised settings so that they can achieve higher framerates without a drop in sharpness/resolution. 
  

(80% VS Native)
  

 

(90% VS Native)