Today, we are going to take a deep look at what are the Best Graphic settings for Horizon Zero Dawn, by using the built-in benchmark at 4K (3840 x 2160).
Horizon Zero Dawn has been a PlayStation exclusive since February 2017, but finally made its way to PC and XBox in August 2020.
While the game offers some superb environments, story and Assassin’s Creed-like open world gameplay, it, much like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s graphic benchmarks, it also falls short in terms of graphics performance.
This is a shame, because the character models, (especially the hair and eyes) are by far the best I’ve seen in any other game to date.
Table of Contents
Best Graphics for Horizon Zero Dawn
The game offered me very little room to squeeze out extra frames, while also not even being able to hit 60fps on an RTX 2070, falling short at only 53fps on its LOWEST settings. Things get even worse when going up the ULTRA, at a poor 35fps. This is without any Raytracing in sight to blame it on.
This poor performance comes down to the lack of DLSS and VULKAN in the game, which at this point should come with any game focusing on realistic graphics.
With that said, let’s begin.
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$36.31Horizon Zero Dawn Benchmark PC Setup
The following Horizon Zero Dawn Benchmarks were done at 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution, using the following PC system specs:
- Graphics Card : Nvidia RTX 2070 Super ($338.00)
- CPU : AMD Ryzen 3700x ($210.00)
- RAM: Corsair CMW32GX4M2C3200C16 Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB ($111.99)
- Motherboard : Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi ($131.65)
- Storage Drive : Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 ($93.62)
- Recording Drive : Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe ($150.90)
- System Drive : Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB SATA ($149.99)
- Power Supply : EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3 ($250.00)
- Monitor :
Samsung 49″ RU7300 – 4K Smart TV (DISCONTINUED)
PC Setup Extras
- Keyboard : Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard ($189.00)
- Keyboard Rubber O-Rings : Rosewill Mechanical Keyboard Rubber O-Rings (Price not available)
- Mouse : Corsair M65 Elite – FPS Gaming Mouse ($44.88)
- Gaming Controller : Microsoft Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 ($160.99)
- PC Case : Phanteks Eclipse P600S (Price not available)
- PC Case Fans : Corsair LL120 RGB, 120mm RGB LED Fan – Triple Pack ($69.99)
- PC Case RGB LED Strips : Speclux Computer Magnetic Addressable RGB LED Strip Kit ($16.99)
- PC Case RGB Controller : Corsair iCUE Commander PRO ($99.99)
- CPU Cooler : Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition CPU Air Cooler ($99.99)
Microphone : Rode NT1-A Anniversary Condenser Microphone (DEPRECIATED)- Microphone Stand : RODE PSA 1 Swivel Mount Studio Microphone Boom Arm ($98.50)
- Audio Interface Device : Steinberg UR22C 2×2 USB 3.0 Audio Interface ($194.99)
- Headphones : Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 80 Limited Edition Black ($307.37)
- NVMe Expansion : ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card V2 – 4x NVMe M.2 ($47.99)
- HDMI Switch : KVM 4K60p HDMI USB 4 Way Switch (Price not available)
- Stream Deck : Elgato 15 Key Stream Deck (No products found.)
- Monitor RGB LED Light Strips : GIDERWEL RGBW LED Strip Light,16.4ft SMD5050 ($15.99)
- RGB LED Light Strip Controller : GIDERWEL Home Smart Zigbee RGBCCT (Philips Hue Compatible) ($21.99)
- SATA Cables : 10 Pack 16 Inch SATA III 6.0 Gbps Cable (Price not available)
- Figurine (Storm Trooper) : Revoltech Star Wars Stormtrooper 6.7″ Action Figure ($181.64)
- Figurine (Darth Vader) : Revoltech Star Wars Darth Vader 6.7″ Action Figure ($60.39)
Horizon Zero Dawn Preset Benchmarks
The most obvious place to start any benchmark, are the graphic presets, which in this case are Favor Performance [LOW], Original [MEDIUM], Favor Quality [HIGH] and Ultimate Quality [ULTRA].
With these results, we are able to get a fairly good idea of the maximum and minimum results we can expect from Horizon Zero Dawn, before diving deeper into each individual graphic setting.
Here we can see that each graphic preset setting in Horizon Zero Dawn delivers a semi-linear progression in frame per second performance gains from the lower setting.
Using the Favor Performance [LOW] setting, I was able to reach 53fps, while at the opposite side of the spectrum, the Ultimate Quality [ULTRA] setting gave 35fps, resulting in a 34% loss in performance,
In-between these two min and max results, we have Original [MEDIUM] with 47fps, Favor Quality [HIGH] with 39fps.
If we then put this into a table format, we can analyze the performance gain each setting has over the Ultimate Quality [ULTRA] setting of 35fps.
Here again we can see a steady progression in performance, as we incrementally lower the preset settings from Ultimate Quality [ULTRA].
- Favor Performance [LOW] = 18fps (51%) performance gain
- Original [MEDIUM] = 12fps (34%) performance gain
- Favor Quality [HIGH] = 4fps (11%) performance gain
While this is great foundational information, we now have to make use of this, in order to best optimize our Horizon Zero Dawn’s performance and graphic details, by individually testing each setting.
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Horizon Zero Dawn Benchmarks - Individual Settings
As with all my best graphic settings benchmark articles, I will do so by using the Ultimate Quality [ULTRA] preset (or max values for each setting), then set each individual slider setting to its LOWEST/OFF setting, one at a time, then running the benchmark again each time.
With this data, we can then see how each one influences performance.
This will allow us to then rank which individual graphic settings are most resource intensive and tone those down, in order to get the most visual detail, for optimal trade off in frame per second (fps) performance.
Here are the results.
Right off the bat, we can see that individually, the majority of the Horizon Zero Dawn’s graphic settings offer very little difference in performance between the very highest and very lowest/off setting, except for the regular culprits that stand out in most benchmarks, being Reflections and in this case, Volumetric Clouds.
If we again put this into a sorted table from highest to lowest performance gains, we can more clearly see which settings are our performance hogs.
As per the graph stats, we can see the setting with Reflections set to low, offers a solid 5fps (14%) performance gain, while Clouds at low resulted in an extra 4fps (11%) gain.
Coming in third is Ambient Occlusion which on its lowest setting, yielded a 3fps (9%) performance gain.
Oddly enough, the various Anti-Aliasing settings had very little effect in Horizon Zero Dawn, only offering 1fps (3%) difference between them and TAA.
In the vast majority of other games that I have benchmarked, Anti-Aliasing is usually one of the biggest resource culprits, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here, so you can definitely leave it on TAA, which is the best option.
The other settings, including Textures, Model Quality, Anisotropic Filtering, Shadows and Motion Blur offer absolutely no performance gains when set to their lowest values, so there is no reason to keep them on anything but ULTRA.
There isn’t much else to the setting in Horizon Zero Dawn, as there are only these 9 individual settings to teak, so your only real options are Reflections, Clouds and Ambient Occlusion.
How to get 4K 60fps in Horizon Zero Dawn
Unfortunately, with an RTX 2070 Super, you can’t, as the game is actually very badly optimized in terms of performance, as even with the Favor Performance [LOW] preset is only able to output 53fps, which falls a solid 7fps short of 60fps – not great at all.
The developers REALLY need to spend more time optimizing this game with DLSS and VULKAN – see more details below.
Doing the best with what we have available, I took the above benchmark results andI tweaked the Reflections to HIGH, Clouds to MEDIUM and Ambient Occlusion to HIGH. This netted me an extra 5fps (14%), taking my frame up to 40fps from the Ultimate Quality [ULTRA] of 35fps.
In summary, here are Best Graphic Settings for Horizon Zero Dawn, offering the best performance, while retaining the most graphical detail and beauty on my Nvidia RTX 2070 Super at 4K (3840 x 2160):
- Textures: ULTRA
- Model Quality: ULTRA
- Anisotropic Filtering: ULTRA
- Shadows: ULTRA
- Reflections: HIGH
- Clouds: MEDIUM
- Anti-Aliasing: TAA
- Motion Blur: OFF
- Ambient Occlusion: HIGH
You are welcome to reduce these further, but I like to try keep reflection as high as possible, otherwise they start looking really bad, especially screen-space reflection, which is the case in Horizon Zero Dawn, as it unfortunately does not support any Raytracing.
I also chose HIGH for Ambient Occlusion, as medium took too much detail away in my opinion, while I don’t care too much for the clouds, so I set this to MEDIUM. If you want a little bit extra performance, then set each of these lower to your liking.
Lastly I turned off Motion Blur, not because it had any impact on performance, but because I just don’t like it in game, but that’s just me.
NO DLSS or VULKAN
As mentioned above, Horizon Zero Dawn is actually a poorly optimized game in terms of graphical performance, as I was just barely able to reach my goal of 53fps, if I settled for the lowest of low settings, which simply isn’t acceptable in this day and age.
We have two major software technologies available to use in games today that would easily be able to provide 60fps using the ULTRA Preset, had the developers made use of them, which is DLSS and the VULKAN API.
Starting off with VULKAN, if you take a look at my Ghost Recon Breakpoint, you will see that just by using VULKAN over DirectX, offers an immediate 10% performance increase.
The second and most important optimization feature lacking here is Nvidia’s DLSS Anti-Aliasing.
In other games such as Wolfenstein Youngblood, I am able to achieve 70fps in ULTRA setting using DLSS. That is a MASSIVE difference, of DOUBLE the performance between it and the measly 35fps I get in Horizon Zero Dawn,
That is just one example, if you check out my Best DLSS Games list, you will see many other examples of AAA High end graphics games beating the socks off the performance of Horizon Zero Dawn
In my DLSS Benchmarks of Mechwarrior V, you can see how DLSS not only provides double the performance, but actually increases the sharpness quality over TAA at its highest settings.
This would easily allow us to play Horizon Zero Dawn at 4K60p on a mid range graphic card such us the RTX2070 Super, but the devs unfortunately haven’t bothered implementing it, so now we sit with 40fps, either requiring V-Sync or content with screen tearing.
Come on Guerrilla Games, you can do better!
The technology is right there at your fingertips, what’s the point of spending so much time porting Horizon Zero Dawn to PC if you are only going to do it half-assed?
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Best Horizon Zero Dawn Settings Conclusion
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