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Horizon Zero Dawn’s shader optimisation is no longer mandatory

When Horizon Zero Dawn launched in early August this year for PC it was a mess in terms of performance and stability. Thankfully, instead of leaving it the way it was, developer Guerrilla Games has continued to patch the port months later, resulting in the latest update to the game today.

Patch 1.07 is now live and its focus is on some of the more difficult graphical issues which have plagued the game since launch.

One issue brought up since the August launch was a very long shader optimisation step which was mandatory when firing up the game. Depending on your system this could take ages and really damper the first time experience. On top of that, it was a nuisance in other ways.

For example in our first playthrough the game hard crashed during the first mission which meant we had to sit through the shader optimisation and the unskippable opening cutscene twice.

With Patch 1.07 this step is now optional. For those who skip it the shaders optimisation will still happen, but you won’t have to stare at a loading screen while it does.

“With Patch 1.07 the team has rewritten the way the engine deals with shaders and shader-optimisation. This results in the optimisation step becoming optional, as well as the Anisotropic Filtering option now working as expected. What this means for you: upon starting the game, it will start optimising shaders in the Main Menu each time. Shaders will also still be optimised during gameplay, but this now happens automatically in the background,” reads a post from Guerrilla.

This is a very welcome quality of life change that we’re happy to see. We’re not the only ones as, judging by comments surrounding this patch, Horizon Zero Dawn has really reached a point where it’s stable for most people.

You can read the full but short 1.07 patch notes here. We expect these patch notes to remain small in the future as the last issues are dealt with.

If you’ve been on the fence for this game because of technical issues it’s becoming a more promising prospect by the day. You can also check out our review from launch to learn about some subjective issues too. 

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