Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

[Unknown Soldier]

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.

PCGamer has it as Virtuous hence why I used it.

Virtuous, the developer behind the port, on behalf of Guerrilla Games

https://www.pcgamer.com/horizon-zero-dawn-pc-performance-benchmarks/

 

[dobwal]

Has the day one patch been applied? If not, then what’s the point?

 

[BRiT]

Still issues even with the first patch, from the reports.

 

[AlNom]

PCGamer has it as Virtuous hence why I used it.

No worries. It highlights how it's not that clear!

 

[Jay]

Has the day one patch been applied? If not, then what’s the point?

He specifically said issues after patch.

 

[dobwal]

He specifically said issues after patch.

Missed that. Thanks.

 

[Shortbread]

PCGamer has it as Virtuous hence why I used it.



https://www.pcgamer.com/horizon-zero-dawn-pc-performance-benchmarks/

I believe this will be the case for most first-party games from Sony. An independent developer porting them over to PC. Sony isn't going to spend major resources or time porting older titles on a platform that has thousands of configurations and requires more testing across a broad spectrum of them. What Sony needs to do, is make sure that the chosen independent development house meets certain standards of quality with their hand-me-down PC ports. If not, that additional revenue stream will easily dry up with bad reviews and word of mouth about their terrible wares.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

I believe this will be the case for most first-party games from Sony. An independent developer porting them over to PC. Sony isn't going to spend major resources or time porting older titles on a platform that has thousands of configurations and requires more testing across a broad spectrum of them. What Sony needs to do, is make sure that the chosen independent development house meets certain standards of quality with their hand-me-down PC ports. If not, that additional revenue stream will easily dry up with bad reviews and word of mouth on their terrible wares.

The game is not bad though, reviews I read enjoy it and Metacritic is 85 from 36 critics.

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/horizon-zero-dawn-complete-edition

 

[Shortbread]

The game is not bad though, reviews I read enjoy it and Metacritic is 85 from 36 critics.

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/horizon-zero-dawn-complete-edition

I meant going forward. That any future ports have better quality measures/control in place when it comes to independent development houses porting their games over to PC.

 

[function]

If the performance is there, then bad pacing is on you as a developer.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Good to see that SSD does indeed improve texture pop in as I long suspected but repeatedly got told was not the case 'SSD on consoles only improves loading times'.

Interesting the varying degrees of improvment on loading - what's that all about - from ~20% to ~3x improvements game dependent!?

It's likely down to whether files being loaded are large files (faster transfer) or lots of smaller files (slower transfer).

Regards,
SB

 

[see colon]

Sony isn't going to spend major resources or time porting older titles on a platform that has thousands of configurations and requires more testing across a broad spectrum of them.

Well, they should. Even if Sony isn't porting a game in house, it's their product. Just because they are commissioning another developer to handle the port doesn't mean that they have no responsibility in the quality of the product.

 

[Jawed]

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.

So the console game should be made worse just to suit PC?

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.

Death Stranding comparisons seem way off base to me. HZD world is far more complex.

Also, at 1440p RX580 was "14%" faster than GTX1060 than in Death Stranding in a section of DF's video from 14 July. 12% faster at 1080p. So there's a clear bias towards AMD with the engine, but it seems like NVidia hasn't produced a driver specifically for the game.

 

[Globalisateur]

Regardless of who did the port, people still associate the title with Sony and GG. The rest is a technicality for most.

Technically GG didn't make that port period. The rest is just mental imagination.

 

[BRiT]

Technically GG didn't make that port period. The rest is just mental imagination.

We know that, but most others don't.

 

[Shortbread]

Just because they are commissioning another developer to handle the port doesn't mean that they have no responsibility in the quality of the product.

Didn't say they shouldn't.

Hence my statements (which you snipped), "Sony needs to do, is make sure that the chosen independent development house meets certain standards of quality with their hand-me-down PC ports. If not, that additional revenue stream will easily dry up with bad reviews and word of mouth about their terrible wares" and "That any future ports have better quality measures/controls in place when it comes to independent development houses porting their games over to PC."

So yes, they should have standards and quality control measures in place when commissioning independent development houses doing their PC ports.

 

[Shortbread]

We know that, but most others don't.

Agreed. Even on Steam the developer is listed as Guerilla Games and Published by PlayStation Mobile Inc. So yes, Sony needs to take responsibility on how their PC wares are presented (the actual porting development house) and the quality of them.

 

[Lalaland]

So the console game should be made worse just to suit PC?

Oh no that wasn't what I meant at all. It may have sounded like I was criticising the design choices GG made for HZD with "too highly fitted" but that wasn't my intention. It's only "too highly fitted" in terms of an attempt to port it to PC which was likely not even a design goal for GG at the time. The point I was trying to make is the choices they made for HZD were entirely PS4-centric making the port job considerably more challenging given that unified memory is not a thing on PC and PCI-E port b/w is very easy to mess up in the real world. When Death Stranding was being designed multi-platform was a goal from the start and thus they didn't make choices that would have revealed the PCI-E misconfiguration in Alex's PC that HZD has.

 

[Rootax]

Would be funny to retest the game with futur pci-e 5. Maybe perfs will go up again...

 

[PSman1700]

120Hz PS5 gaming!