Horizon Forbidden West PC review: a near-perfect port

Published On: April 7, 2024

Despite being available for the PS4 and PS5 as a cross-gen game, Horizon Forbidden West (review) was breathtaking regarding the visuals, especially on the PS5. The lush world looked dense, the mechanical foes looked menacing and some of the sequences in the night (especially in Vegas) were a sight to behold. We can easily summarise the PC port of Horizon Forbidden West as breathtaking as well. Today we will take a look at how an entry-level gaming laptop runs Horizon Forbidden West, how the game performs on a flagship high-end PC, and also highlight the experience on a sub-Rs 1 lakh gaming laptop. Since the game has been available for a while on the PlayStation consoles, we won’t delve into the story as that hasn’t changed at all in this PC port. This article will also give you an idea of how well this game has been ported, and whether it’s a GPU-heavy or CPU-heavy port. So let’s dive into the world of Horizon Forbidden West on the familiar and unlocked Windows platform.

Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition Game Review

First of all, the transition of this game from a console to a Windows platform is seamless, as it has been ported by PC Port Studio Nixxes Software, the same team that brought us titles like Spider-Man Remastered, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition and God of War to name a few. Needless to say, they know what they are doing when porting a PlayStation game to the PC. Speaking of the visual prowess of Horizon Forbidden West, the game offers a plethora of settings and sliders to tweak the visuals. It even supports ultrawide aspect ratios and multi-monitor setups for a wider field of view and a more immersive visual experience. Needless to say, if you want to exploit the potential of features exclusive to PC, you won’t be disappointed with this game.

Table of Contents

Benchmarks

Coming to the performance segment of the game, we ran the game on our own custom-built high-end desktop that uses an Intel i9-14900K CPU, 48GB of 7200MT/s RAM, 2TB Kingston Renegade Fury Gen4 NVMe SSD and the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super all running on the ASUS ROG Maximus HERO motherboard, powered by a gold certified Antec 1000W PSU. The RTX 4070 Super in our PC offers 12GB of VRAM. We ran the game on three popular standard resolutions: UHD, QHD and FHD. It was here that we found that given enough resources, the game can look stunning. Walking in the lush green forest during the initial sequence of the game, we saw a ton of details giving a sense of immersion.

Let’s look at some performance numbers. With upscaling set to quality using DLSS at the Very High graphical preset (Very High is the highest graphical preset) and frame generation turned ON

At UHD we saw an average of 85 fps
At QHD we saw an average frame rate of 118 fps
At FHD we saw an average of 139 fps (VRAM consumed 9GB)

Additionally, this performance was stable as we didn’t notice any stuttering or frame time inconsistencies.

Horizon Forbidden West on HP OMEN Transcend 14

Next up we ran the game on the HP OMEN TRANSCEND 14. The performance is equivalent to a sub-Rs 1 lakh gaming laptop as this machine offers an RTX 4060 (50W TGP). Here we tested the game at 2,880 x 1,800 pixels and 2,560 x 1,600 pixels as these are some of the newest standard resolutions for modern-day gaming laptops. Here the results at the same Very High graphics preset were 46 FPS (average) frame rates at 1800P and 53 FPS (average) frame rates at the resolution of 1600p.

Considering the visual splendour of the game, the lack of Hardware Ray Tracing is missed. Apart from that there really isn’t anything to complain about the fidelity of the game. It also supports the DualSense controller, so you won’t miss out on any immersive haptic magic that Sony has done with the PS5 controller.

More tests

Finally, let’s take a look at what happens when you play the game on a more modest machine. When I tested the game at the VERY HIGH graphical preset on an entry-level gaming laptop with an RTX 4050 (6GB VRAM at 60W TGP), I noticed that while the laptop offered us a stable frame rate of 35 FPS (average) at 1080P, the game consumed almost all the GPU VRAM (5GB). Moving to 720P the frame rates rose to 45FPS, but the VRAM remained at 5100 MB, the same that was consumed at 1080P. This highlights that there is a cap that prevents the game from consuming the entire VRAM available on any GPU.

So, it’d be good to have as much VRAM as possible while playing Horizon Forbidden West. As for the CPU, if you happen to have any modern-day mid-tier CPU like an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or maybe something as low as an Intel i3-8100, you should still be able to play the game and enjoy it.

Verdict

Horizon Forbidden West was an excellent game on the PS5 with a unique perspective on a post-apocalyptic world, well-written characters and an engaging sci-fi story. The cliffhanger ending will leave you on the edge of your seat for the third game, but I’m not complaining. The game will take you about 25-30 hours to go through the story and you can add another 30 hours exploring the world and finishing every possible side quest. If you love open-world action-adventure games on the PC, the Horizon Forbidden West should definitely be on your list.