Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

So was Death Stranding, and using the same engine. But that runs fine, so I don't think that's a viable explanation.

 

But it seems that DS was planned on pc from the start, no ?

 

Well it's because GNM exposes a unified memory architecture so CPU-GPU memory transfers are very cheap on the PS4 ...

 

HZD uses GPU-based procedural placement system that dynamically creates the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn around the player. This has to go to main RAM, hence the PCIE bottleneck ant stuttering would be my guess. On ps4 GPU writes to unified pool, and not bottlenecked by PC driver overheads and slow busses.

 

I don't know how the two compare in terms of early planning for the PC, I'm not sure anyone but the developers can really know that, but the fact that some pretty basic elements of the game are very buggy, or completely broken, like AF, the frame rate limiter, full screen mode, resolution scaling, the shader pre-compile etc.. it suggests to me that the more likely explanation is just a very poorly done port.

The explanations above around the high PCIe bandwidth usage seem highly plausible though. IMO it's actually a good thing that we're seeing that link put to better use. But only if it's done properly.

 

I wonder if this is as much a case of the game design having been too highly fitted to the platform it was designed for, the feature senis_kennis describes is precisely the kind of thing you would probably avoid in a design intended for multiple platforms. PCIe slot bandwidth is actually a major pain in the hole and the situation Alex describes where he had inadvertently configured his expansion cards in such a way as to halve the PCIe b/w on the x16 slot is probably a fairly common scenario in the wild (especially given how this info is often tucked deep into the obscure corners of the m/b manual). The port house can only do so much when the base game has baked in assumptions like unified GPU & CPU memory.

Not to say it's good enough to ship a game in the state it's in but comparisons to Death Stranding seem off to me when it was not designed from the ground up as a console exclusive only to be later shoehorned onto other platforms.

 

That's true, there's a difference.
But don't the same segment also shows the 1060 glitching a bit? Maybe that's the reason for the lower performance.

 

Thanks. I then likely think GG takes full responsibility for the port. Pity, as you said, the perception is that they are perfectionists.

 

stutter can be very easily solved on PC. It's a frametime issue. Just use the Max Framerate setting of the nVidia Control Panel in the Program Settings, choose the game that gives you issues, create a Max Framerate for it and problem solved. Perfect frametime.

AO Tennis 2 is truly horrible in this regard, and I enabled a Max Framerate for it, it worked like a charm. Now it plays soooo heavenly.

Uneven frametime is why some people say that "30 fps on consoles feel better than 30fps on PCs" and this happens when (doesnt matter how powerful is your PC) the frametime is not even, there can be stutter at such a low framerate.

 

I wondered about this but @Dictator did imply in the video that a frame limiter other than the in game one was tried to no avail. I assume that included the Nvidia driver option.

 

I used the half refresh rate option from Nvidia which has good framepacing at 30 fps, but will not get rid of the larger stutters I saw!

 

Doesn’t star citizen render procedural?

 

Definitely try the Nvidia control panel FPS limiter setting over half refresh rate. Stutters can still occur due to dropped frames, but overall frame time should be more consistent.

 

Not making any excuses but to think a lot of time and budget would be set aside for a port to PC when they are potentially working on two games for PS5 and probably under pressure to get it done as quick as possible and to deliver upon there success is asking a bit much.

It comes across as what I thought it would be, an experiment with most the work done to the engine to make it work on PC done by Kojima productions.

 

One of the things that I'm a bit surprised about is the range of opinions about the game performance. Some people with less powerfull HW than Dictator are reporting better than average results, and others with top of the line PCs are having constant crashes and horrible performance. Nice QA Sony.

 

that, and also you can use Rivatuner, which has an option to create a perfectly even framerate. But the simplest, get to the point option, is nVidia's max framerate limiter

 

If I remember correctly world generation is on CPU side, GPU generates only higher tessellation witch is not important for world interaction. But someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Horizon port is bad and people are blaming Guerrilla? Ridiculous. Do people blame Nintendo when a bad Switch port is released ?

 

It's not well advertised. A quick google search of Virtuous & Horizon Zero Dawn doesn't even turn up anything.

As already mentioned, communication was with Guerrilla, so why would they think it was anyone else unless they were explicitly told?

edit:
There's a single mention here:
https://www.pcgamer.com/horizon-zero-dawn-pc-performance-benchmarks/

Apparently, it's actually spelled Virtuos
https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/08/05/horizon-zero-dawn-pc-port-review/

And the HZD wiki page doesn't even mention them, nor does the Virtuos page mention the port.