Horizon Forbidden West is a marvel — if your PC can handle the heat

28.03.2024 - 20:27 / digitaltrends.com / Jacob Roach

More than two years after its release on PS5, Horizon Forbidden West is now available on PC. The original game, Horizon Zero Dawn, has become a mainstay for performance testing on PC, and it’s one of the pillars of our GPU reviews. The sequel ups the ante in a big way with more graphics options and a more demanding world overall.

I’ve been playing the game over the past week, drilling down on the best settings, comparing DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, and testing the bounds of performance. Horizon Forbidden West lives up to the standard set by the original release, though weaker GPUs with only 8GB of memory will struggle with high graphics settings and resolutions.

Best settings for Horizon Forbidden West PC

Horizon Forbidden West has a ton of graphics options. After digging through them, here are the best settings for Horizon Forbidden West to balance performance and image quality on PC:

• Texture Quality: Medium
• Texture Filtering: 2x Anisotropic
• Shadow Quality: Low
• Screen Space Shadows: On
• Ambient Occlusion: SSAO
• Screen Space Reflections: Low
• Level of Detail: Medium
• Hair Quality: Medium
• Terrain Quality: Medium
• Water Quality: Low
• Clouds Quality: Medium
• Translucency Quality: Default
• Parallax Occlusion Mapping: On
• Depth of Field: High
• Bloom: On
• Motion Blur Strength: 0
• Sharpness: 5
• Lens Flares: On
• Vignette: On
• Radial Blur: On
• Chromatic Aberration: On
• Anti-Aliasing: TAA or upscaling

This is a starting point. In Horizon Forbidden West, you’ll see your graphics changes updated in real time as you adjust settings — no restarts required. This is the list I’d start with, but definitely take the time to adjust further for your own PC. Tweaking isn’t a hassle in Horizon Forbidden West as it is in other PC releases like Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Above, you can see how my recommended settings stack up against the Very High and Very Low presets. You’re getting most of the quality of the Very High preset with significantly dialed-back settings and with a massive performance bump to boot.

Some of the settings here are tricky. For instance, the Texture Quality setting doesn’t refer to just textures. It improves the quality of the terrain, as well. You can see this in action if you stand under a rocky patch of land and cycle through the options. The higher settings add more details to the texture but also make the terrain more complex in its geometry.

In addition, the Screen Space Reflections setting doesn’t refer to reflection quality. Instead, it’s a draw distance — how far the reflections are cast — for reflections. You can see how that makes a difference in the video above. For settings like