PlayStation
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is a good PC port that runs awesome on Steam Deck OLED and woeful on ASUS ROG Ally
We tested performance on 3 of the major supported platforms
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, one of the best video games of 2022 that received a 9.3 rating in Meristation, has arrived in its PC version this March 21. Since we have already analyzed it in this version, we decided to focus on its performance on the PC version, Steam Deck OLED and Asus ROG Ally. Here are the results of our review.
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition on PC
This port comes with all the downloadable content available in the game, including the story expansion Burning Shores, and with visual options that try to adapt to different settings from very low to very high. It also includes
- AMD FSR 2.2
- Intel XeSS
- NVIDIA DLSS 3
- And soon they will include AMD FSR 3, including frame generation.
For lovers of viewing angles, they have added Ultra Wide 21:9 aspect ratio, Super Ultra Wide 32:9, as well as 48:9 triple monitor support in 4K.
Among the patents dedicated to NVIDIA graphics cards, in addition to DLSS 3, we have NVIDIA DLAA and NVIDIA Reflex.
- Processor: Intel Core i9-14900K
- Memory: 32 GB Kingston Fury DDR5 at 5600 Mhz
- Motherboard: Z790 AORUS Elite AX
- Cooling system: Aorus Waterforce X240
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
- SSD: Kingstone Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2
On this PC we ran it with all values at maximum, with the frames per second unlocked and without any type of improvement (DLSS 3 or FSR 2.2), the results obtained were more than 120 frames per second and sometimes we went over 130, although it is important to note that in the cinematics we had drops that brought the FPS to 90. Loading times were similar to the PS5 with the SSD we used, with a single compilation of shaders at the beginning that did not represent a long wait.
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition on Steam Deck OLED
Despite being marked as not yet verified to run on this handheld, the game is fully playable as long as you use the native resolution, activate the FSR 2.2 rescaling method in quality mode, Vsync disabled and the visual preset on low. In these conditions, we managed to play with an average of 32 FPS, with some drops that were close to 28, but nothing that would affect the experience. We found this surprising and makes it a great option to consider on this platform.
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition on the Asus ROG Ally
Despite the fact that the Asus portable has more power than the Steam Deck, this game presented us with several problems, as we did not get a good frame rate when running it in 10 or 15W mode (the equivalent power consumption of Valve’s portable). To get the best performance from the battery, we had to use a resolution of 1280 x 720, Vsync disabled, the FSR 2.2 rescaling method in Quality mode, the 25W mode without FPS limiter and with AMD RSR Active. With this configuration, we were able to play with an average of 42 FPS, although there were several moments with drops that came close to 18 FPS.
It is important to mention that on this handheld we can run the game in Full HD with the same configuration proposed above, even raising the graphics preset to medium. Here we will have an average of 33 frames per second but overheating and power consumption are considerable. In fact, perhaps derived from the same we get to have drops of up to 28 FPS.
The bad thing about playing it on this system is that in any of the two configurations that we found stable, you need to use the operating mode at 25W, which reduces the possibility of playing it for more than an hour on battery. When trying it with 15W the FPS hovers below 22FPS.
In 30W mode, we were able to get over 40 FPS with the same HD configuration, but that requires keeping the handheld connected.
The controls in this port
There was no major problem with the Steam Deck layout, in fact, it appears in the controls menu as is. Rog Ally, on the other hand, appears with an Xbox controller layout, although it works fine in practice. On the PC, we played with an XBOX controller, a PDP controller, and the DualSense controller with haptic feedback. If we use a keyboard and mouse, it also works smoothly.
In broad strokes, we can say that this version of the video game from Guerrilla Games, Nixxes Software, and Sony Interactive Entertainment, which is also available for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, is a well-done port for PC that has even taken the optimization to Valve’s portable, the Steam Deck. In the case of Rog Ally, we may have to wait for a few more updates.