How to improve FPS in Horizon Forbidden West (PC)
Horizon Forbidden West arrives on PC with the Decima engine, the same technology behind Death Stranding 2 and God of War, and inherits its reputation for scaling beautifully across a huge range of hardware. Exploring the Forbidden West, facing robotic machines like the Tremortusk, or diving through submerged ruins demands plenty of GPU power thanks to dense vegetation and machine effects, but with the right tweaks you can hold high FPS even on mid-range cards. This guide covers the highest-impact settings, upscaling, and the port's known issues.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +33% free FPS.
Shadow Quality
The dynamic shadows from the Forbidden West's dense vegetation and the robotic machines are among the heaviest settings for the GPU. Dropping from Ultra to Medium is barely noticeable in motion but frees up a good chunk of performance.
Parallax Occlusion Mapping
Adds fake depth to rock and terrain textures, but has a disproportionate performance cost for how subtle the effect is on most surfaces.
Screen Space Reflections (SSR)
Reflections mainly affect water during swimming and diving sections. Medium keeps believable water reflections without the cost of full resolution.
Motion Blur
Doesn't add any real performance on its own, but reduces perceived sharpness in fast combat against machines and can cause visual discomfort.
Depth of Field
Softens the background in cutscenes and dialogue; Digital Foundry recommends keeping it on High/Medium because the performance impact is low compared to other settings.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
On GPUs with 8GB of VRAM, High is perfectly playable up to 1440p; if you go up to 4K or have less VRAM, dropping to Medium avoids hitches from memory shortfalls in certain cutscenes.
Level of Detail (LOD)
Controls the distance at which vegetation and terrain detail appear in the Forbidden West. Lowering it increases the pop-in you trade off against, but frees up GPU headroom in open areas.
Vegetation Quality
Grass and foliage density is one of the game's visual trademarks, but also one of its most demanding; Medium keeps a believable world without the overhead of Ultra.
Machine Effects Quality
The particle and spark effects from robotic machines in combat can saturate the GPU in fights against several enemies at once.
Ambient Occlusion
Adds contact shading between objects and terrain; the drop from High to Medium saves performance with a quality loss that's hard to spot without a direct comparison.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
DLSS Quality
+21% FPSThe recommended option on NVIDIA RTX GPUs: it notably improves performance while keeping an image nearly identical to native resolution, even in the game's dense foliage.
DLSS Performance
+35% FPSIdeal for high resolutions (1440p/4K) or more modest GPUs; the performance jump is large and the sharpness loss is easy to accept thanks to the Decima engine's solid implementation.
FSR 3 Quality
+18% FPSA universal alternative for AMD, Intel, or older NVIDIA GPUs; works well but can cause slight ghosting in moving vegetation, somewhat more visible than with DLSS.
XeSS Quality
+17% FPSA good option on Intel Arc GPUs and as an alternative on cards without DLSS; offers image stability somewhere between DLSS and FSR.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Use DLSS instead of FSR whenever you have an RTX card: image reconstruction is noticeably cleaner in the game's dense vegetation.
- •Update to the latest Game Ready drivers before playing; Guerrilla and NVIDIA have released several joint patches to reduce stutter.
- •If you notice frametime fluctuations, disable NVIDIA Reflex from the game's options: several users report stability improvements after turning it off.
AMD
- •FSR 3.1 with Frame Generation works well on RX 6000/7000, but expect some ghosting on hair and fast-moving vegetation.
- •GPUs with 8GB of VRAM (RX 6600/6650 XT) should keep textures on Medium above 1440p to avoid stutter from memory shortfalls.
- •Enable Anti-Lag in the Adrenalin panel to offset the added latency from Frame Generation.
Intel
- •Arc GPUs benefit especially from XeSS in its native mode (XMX) versus FSR, with better image quality at the same performance.
- •Keep Arc drivers up to date: Intel has published several optimizations specific to Decima-engine games.
- •If you use a recent-generation Intel CPU, check that Windows' efficiency mode isn't limiting the P-cores during shader compilation.
Sistema
- •Install the game on an SSD: texture streaming in the Forbidden West and the diving zones depends heavily on read speed.
- •Let the shader compilation step finish on first launch without closing the game; cutting it short increases stutter later on.
- •Close background applications that use the GPU (overlays, recorders), since the game is sensitive to VRAM contention in scenes with many machines on screen.
5. Known game issues
Stutters from real-time shader compilation
The game only precompiles part of the vegetation shaders at launch; the rest compile on the fly using free CPU cores, causing micro-stutter especially in the first few hours or when entering new areas.
Estado: Patch 1.4
Framerate drops in cutscenes
Some cutscenes force higher graphics settings internally and cause punctual FPS drops even with an optimized configuration, especially on machines with heavy VRAM usage.
Memory leaks in long sessions
After several hours of continuous play, especially switching between zones with and without water, some users report a progressive rise in VRAM usage that ends in stutter; restarting the game fixes it temporarily.
6. Frequently asked questions
Do I need a very powerful GPU to run Horizon Forbidden West well on PC?▾
Why does the game hitch as soon as I start playing?▾
DLSS or FSR in Horizon Forbidden West?▾
Which settings should I lower first if I'm short on FPS?▾
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Calculate FPS for Horizon Forbidden West →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →