Conclusion

Horizon Forbidden West is an extraordinary continuation of Aloy's journey, delving deeper into the narrative established by its predecessor, as she endeavors to restore the biosphere, thus presenting players with an excellent main story. The game features a blend of classic and new machine enemies, offering encounters that bring a sense of familiarity and surprise, keeping you engaged throughout. Additionally, an upgraded skill tree provides players with numerous options for enhancing Aloy's abilities, allowing for greater customization and strategic depth in gameplay. Alongside this, a diverse selection of weapons and outfits further enriches the experience, offering plenty of choices to tailor Aloy's approach to combat and exploration. The necessity of upgrading gear and outfits becomes evident as players face tougher challenges, empowering them to become formidable adversaries in the face of adversity. The expansive world of Forbidden West encourages exploration, with numerous side quests and activities waiting to be discovered, promising hours of immersive gameplay and rewarding discovery for those willing to leave no rock unturned.

The graphics look great, especially considering the massive size of this open world adventure. Most textures are highly detailed, contributing to a visually rich and immersive gaming experience, but some NPCs look a bit low quality, both in terms of texturing and geometric complexity. The visual artists made sure that the real-time-rendered cut-scenes look MUCH better than the gameplay rendering—here textures and models are top-notch. I also liked the facial expressions in cut scenes, which are among the most realistic I've seen in a game. Thanks to excellent rendering of vegetation, the post-apocalyptic Earth comes to live, featuring dense vegetation that adds depth and realism to the landscapes. Towns and settlements do look a bit dated though, there's a definite lack of geometry and texture detail here.

There isn't much to see in terms of advanced effects like ray tracing and reflections. As mentioned before, there is no support for RT, which is slightly unexpected for a AAA release in 2024. HFW came out in 2022 though as a PS5 exclusive, so I guess that explains the lack of RT support. Compared to the PS5 version there's only minimal image quality upgrades, mostly for the LOD, which still has a tendency to create visible jumps in model detail as you progress through the world.

Shader compilation is done during the map loading stage, which adds quite some delay, especially on AMD and Intel. On NVIDIA the shader compilation is much faster, but still takes a noticeable amount of time, depending on your CPU speed. I also noticed several crashes on AMD, mostly during shader compilation or in the first seconds after entering the map, when there's still some shader compilation running in the background. Besides that I encountered no noteworthy stuttering, the game runs very smoothly and there's almost no loading screens, creating a very seamless experience.

Hardware requirements of the game are pretty reasonable. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with the highest settings you only need a RX 5700 XT, RTX 4060 or RX 6600 XT. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 3070, RX 6700 XT or RX 7700 XT. 4K60? Radeon RX 6900 XT, RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 3090 Ti are required—not exactly mid-range, but still pretty manageable. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which runs in a typical open-world location with vegetation and water. There's some indoors location that run at much higher FPS. Both AMD and NVIDIA cards are positioned roughly where we usually see them in our performance charts. Intel's A770 falls a bit behind, despite the use of optimized drivers. It's interesting to see that the older RDNA 2 cards run very well in Horizon Forbidden West, a bit better than the modern RDNA 3 models (for example RX 6800 XT beating RX 7800 XT).

The performance scaling is very good. You can gain roughly 60% extra FPS with just settings, and the game is still extremely playable at "Very Low." In HFW you have access to upscaling using AMD FSR, NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS—we will have a separate article on upscaling soon. This means that it will be easy to reach 60 FPS, no matter the hardware you have, and you can choose between employing upscaling with higher in-game detail settings, or using lower detail settings but at native resolution. Frame Generation is only available through DLSS 3, FSR 3 isn't supported yet. The developers have confirmed that they "are working on integrating AMD FSR 3 including Frame Generation in a future update."

Our VRAM testing shows that Forbidden West is quite reasonable with its memory requirements. 8 GB is enough even for 4K at highest settings, which is also confirmed by our RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB vs 16 GB results—there's no performance difference between both cards, even when maxed out. For lower resolutions, the VRAM requirements are a bit on the high side, because even 1080p at lowest settings reaches around 5 GB, which could make things difficult for older 4 GB-class cards.

Overall, Horizon Forbidden West is a fantastic game, even though it doesn't redefine the genre. The PC version is outstanding, done by the porting masters of Nixxes. The game is also DRM-free and works fine completely offline.