Horizon Forbidden West Is Another Solid PC Port from Nixxes

23.03.2024 - 02:43 / wccftech.com / Miles Morales / Alessio Palumbo / Sony

Two years and a month after Horizon Forbidden West launched on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles, PC gamers can finally step into the vast and gorgeous post-apocalyptic Western USA created by Guerrilla Games.

The main work on the PC version was done by Nixxes, the Dutch port team that worked for years for Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montréal, and IO Interactive before Sony came in and acquired them in July 2021. This acquisition was a critical component of Sony's plan to expand its prized console exclusives to the PC platform. In less than three years, Nixxes already worked on four games, starting with Horizon Zero Dawn (although they only worked on post-launch patches as Virtuos made the base game) and then focusing on Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Of these three, only Rift Apart showed some issues at launch due to stuttering, lack of ray tracing on AMD hardware, and even some weirdly missing effects and texture loading problems. The ports of the Spider-Man games, on the other hand, were excellent.

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Thankfully, Horizon Forbidden West is another solid example of a PC port from the experienced studio based in Utrecht. As we're used to from previous Sony ports, almost the entire breadth of features is available here: Ultrawide support (21:9 and 32:9), NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation, NVIDIA Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing, NVIDIA Reflex, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, Microsoft DirectStorage, not to mention full support for the DualSense controller's haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and built-in speaker.

The High Dynamic Range implementation is good, too, although the main slider to set your display's Max Luminance currently doesn't work. However, the sliders for Paper White, Shadow Boost and Highlight Boost work just fine, and they're way more than what HDR users can find in the average PC game when it comes to tweaking their HDR experience.

While Horizon Forbidden West does not offer native support for Dolby Atmos, users with an Atmos-compatible soundbar or surround system can successfully enable Atmos in Windows and then use the upmixer functionality available through the Dolby Access app. The result is surprisingly good, owing to the high quality of the 7.1 sound mix prepared by the developers.

Of course, simply adding most of the cutting-edge features is only the first step in making a proper PC port. The other, more important question is whether the game performs decently. Too often of late, PC gamers have had to deal with stuttering and similarly annoying issues upon release.

That's not