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Horizon Zero Dawn gets update plus DLSS 11 months after last patch

Well here’s a very welcome surprise: the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition has been updated to Patch 1.11 which now allows for Nvidia DLSS as well as other changes.

The original PC launch of Horizon Zero Dawn was incredibly rough in terms of stability and performance but developer Guerrilla Games has steadily been improving it.

After some rapid fire patches over time, it was announced that development on the PC port would be slowed down after Patch 1.10 in January this year. We expected some smaller patches eventually but added features were not what we imagined.

On the AMD side of things FidelityFX Super Resolution is now supported too. We won’t get into how this compares to Nvidia’s DLSS but, again, it’s nice that there’s broad support here regardless of your hardware.

Everyone playing the game will also benefit from performance improvements especially around shaders. At launch, and even after a few patches, compiling shaders before playing the game could take a very long time. This step has now been removed and will be done in the background as the game is played.

For those who haven’t tried Horizon Zero Dawn on PC, check out our launch review. Even with the original poor performance we managed to have a good time and now latecomers to the party will enjoy an even better experience and more features.

Another Steam sale is scheduled to take place between 22nd December 2021 and 5th January 2022 so it will likely be available for purchase at a discount soon too.

The full notes for Patch 1.11 can be found below:

Graphical Improvements
  • Added Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology.
  • Added AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, replacing FidelityFX CAS.
UI Changes
  • Adjusted settings screen to facilitate the addition of DLSS and FSR.
  • Render Scale option has been removed but same result can now be accomplished by adjusting setting Upscale Method to Simple and adjusting Upscale Quality.
Performance Improvements
  • Improvement to the shader management system. This will result in a few noticeable differences:
  • There is no longer a shader pre-compilation step on startup. The game will always compile shaders during loading and in the background.
  • Stutters during gameplay that used to occur due to background shader compilation have now been significantly reduced.
  • Because shader compilation is still happening in the background you may notice the game having a higher CPU utilization while that is happening.
  • Loading screens will wait for the required shaders to be fully compiled. This may cause loading screens to take somewhat longer on certain systems.
  • On higher spec machines with faster CPUs the loading screens will typically be shorter, due to more efficient shader compilation that better leverages high-end CPUs.
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