Introduction

Horizon Forbidden West has finally released on PC, with several enhancements over its original PlayStation 5 release, such as an increased LOD quality, full support for ultra-wide screens and Direct Storage 1.2. The PC release also has support for NVIDIA's DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation (also known as DLSS 3), NVIDIA's Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), Intel's Xe Super Sampling 1.2 (XeSS 1.2) and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2 (FSR 2.2) from day one. AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation isn't supported on launch day, but the developers will add it in a future update. All implemented upscaling solutions are able to use Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) at 30, 45 and 60 FPS, a very welcome feature. When DRS is active, the internal resolution will scale from 100% to a maximum of 50% in more demanding scenes. In order to run Horizon Forbidden West at maximum graphics settings and reasonable framerates at native resolution, quite a powerful GPU is required, which is why upscaling solutions are so important. But depending on the game, there can be differences in the implementations of NVIDIA's DLSS, Intel's XeSS and AMD's FSR, so we are keen to take a look at how temporal upscalers perform in Horizon Forbidden West.



Below, you will find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and in different XeSS, FSR and DLSS quality modes; the TAA, DLAA and DLSS Frame Generation screenshots are also available in the dropdown menu. For those who want to see how these technologies perform in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video. The video can help uncover issues which are not visible in the screenshots, such as shimmering or temporal instability.

All tests were made using a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU at Very High graphics settings; motion blur, depth of field, film grain and chromatic aberration were disabled for better image viewing. DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Frame Generation in this game shipped with version 3.5.10.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

Horizon Forbidden West has a very dense and detailed game world, surrounded by different varieties of trees and vegetation, many of which are always in motion due to a dynamic wind system and other weather effects. DLSS, XeSS and FSR are able to retain these unique details at close and medium distances—without shimmering or flickering issues in motion. An impressive result, especially for FSR upscaling, as it often struggles to retain details in moving vegetation, resulting in shimmering. Only at far distances the differences in image detail between these upscaling solutions can become visible, but you have to zoom into the still image to be able to see it.

Despite managing to avoid shimmering of vegetation and thin objects in this game, the FSR 2.2 image still has the typical disocclusion artifacts and pixelation in motion, especially around Aloy when moving through the world and during combat. Hair rendering and particle effects details, such as neon-like signs, smoke and fire effects, waterfalls and sea waves also took a hit, producing a blurrier image in motion. The ghosting and smearing on small flying objects, such as snow, dust and flying birds in the distance is another immersion breaking issue with FSR enabled. All these issues are most visible at lower output resolutions, such as 1080p and 1440p, when tested with FSR 2.2 "Quality" mode.

Intel's XeSS comes with three upscaling kernels that are optimized for various architectures. The first is the kernel that gets used on Intel Arc GPUs with their XMX engines. This is the most advanced model too, that not only performs better in terms of FPS, but also offers the best upscaling quality, the "Advanced XeSS upscaling model." Intel also provides an optimized kernel for Intel Integrated Graphics, and another compatibility kernel, used for all other architectures that support Shader Model 6.4, e.g. all recent AMD and NVIDIA cards. These use the "Standard XeSS upscaling model," which is somewhat simpler, with lower performance and quality compared to the Advanced XeSS upscaling model (we use the compatibility model with our test system's RTX 4080). If DP4a instructions aren't available, as on the Radeon RX 5700 XT, slower INT24 instructions are used instead.

Speaking of XeSS in Horizon Forbidden West, the XeSS 1.2 implementation in its DP4a mode looks very disappointing compared to FSR 2.2 and the in-game TAA solution. The XeSS image is suffering from immersion breaking ghosting and smearing on small flying objects, such as snow, dust and flying birds, with pixelation across the whole image. The amount of these ghosting and smearing artifacts is on another level even compared to FSR 2.2. This is very distracting, as these artifacts are visible even at close distances when standing still, and the situation does not improve with higher resolutions, meaning that 1080p XeSS "Ultra Quality" and 4K XeSS "Ultra Quality" modes will have the same amount of ghosting and smearing on screen when moving through the world. Something is definitely wrong with the XeSS 1.2 implementation in this game, and it needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

Speaking of DLSS Super Resolution, the DLSS implementation in this game delivers the most stable and clean image when using upscaling at 1440p and 4K. With DLSS enabled at 1440p and 4K you can expect an improved and stable level of detail of particle effects, more detailed hair rendering without quality loss in motion and improved tree leaves and vegetation rendering, providing a more comprehensive and immersive presentation, particularly during motion, when compared to native TAA or FSR 2.2/XeSS 1.2 solutions. However, things are different at the low 1080p output resolution, which has similar ghosting and smearing artifacts on small flying particles as we saw in the FSR 2.2 and XeSS image, but to a much lesser degree, and these issues are visible only at this low output resolution. It is important to mention that the 1080p DLAA image does not have any ghosting or smearing artifacts, unlike its upscaling brother DLSS.

The DLSS Frame Generation implementation in Horizon Forbidden West is excellent, producing a stable and crisp image without any jittering issues of the in-game on-screen UI, the area where Frame Generation often has issues. Small particle effects, such as snow, dust or rain, are rendered correctly, even during fast movement at 1440p and 4K. However, using Frame Generation at 1080p together with DLSS Super Resolution upscaling, will result in a slightly increased problem of ghosting and smearing artifacts over just using upscaling on its own at this low output resolution. As an additional perk, the DLSS implementation in this game can use DLSS 3 Frame Generation together with DLAA, for a better than native image quality while still benefiting from improved framerates. During our DLSS Frame Generation testing, overall gameplay felt very smooth and responsive, and we didn't spot any issues with input latency.

Regarding performance, the DLSS, XeSS 1.2 and FSR 2.2 implementations in Horizon Forbidden West offer significantly lower performance gains compared to the norm set by previously tested games that use the same technologies. Usually, going from native rendering to an upscaler set to "Quality" mode will grant a solid 40% performance boost, or even higher in some games, but in Horizon Forbidden West, the upscaling performance increase is only around 25% in "Quality" mode compared to native rendering at 4K resolution, and around 20% at 1440p and 1080p resolutions. XeSS 1.2 has slightly lower performance gains across all resolutions and quality modes compared to FSR 2.2. With DLSS Super Resolution in "Quality" mode and Frame Generation enabled, you can expect almost doubled performance across all resolutions compared to native rendering. The DLAA solution has a performance cost of around 4%, compared to the TAA solution, but offers the best graphical experience overall, and as mentioned, can be combined with DLSS 3 Frame Generation for a better than native image quality and FPS.