Nixxes Software’s port was excellent, but it wasn’t perfect, because ray tracing (RT) was left out of Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition… and that was the plan of the studio responsible for the port.
Michiel Roza of Nixxes and Jeroen Krebbers of Guerrilla Games talked about the lack of ray tracing in an interview with Digital Foundry. RT was planned, but was eventually dropped due to the size of the game. It has several hours of cutscenes, the visuals are already good enough, and the game was going in a good direction, something Nixxes Software didn’t want to mess with. Alpha-tested trees make up the bulk of the content, and it’s hard to use ray tracing against that, even for shadows. Scalability between PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 had to take into account what worked on both, but RT was not on that list. Guerrilla loves the technology, so maybe it will show up in one of their future games (like Horizon Online).
That said, the PC port of Horizon Forbidden West is good: it supports ultra-wide (21:9, 32:9) displays as well as these: Nvidia DLSS 2 and 3, DLAA, Reflex; AMD FSR; Microsoft DirectStorage – so it doesn’t skip upscaling and can load faster from your SSD. Of course, the DualSense controller functionality has been fully migrated to the PC (haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, built-in speaker). The HDR implementation is decent, but the maximum luminance slider does not work yet.
There’s no native Dolby Atmos support, but you can turn it on with supporting hardware by enabling it in Windows and then using the upmix function via the Dolby Access app, as the developers have created some high-quality 7.1 material. Performance is near perfect, however, as you’ll rarely experience stuttering, and with a powerful setup (RTX 4090, i9 Intel CPU) and DLSS 3 and DLAA enabled, you can get 70+ FPS at 4K resolution with maximum settings. Anisotropic filtering can also be set to 16x, and Nixxes told Digital Foundry that they’ve improved shadow filtering and resolution.
So the port is good.
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