How to improve FPS in Horizon Zero Dawn (PC)
Horizon Zero Dawn arrived on PC in 2020 after Nixxes Software's work on Guerrilla Games' Decima engine, the same engine that powers Death Stranding. It's an open world dense with procedural vegetation, volumetric lighting, and extremely high-polygon machine models, so the CPU/GPU load split is more balanced than usual for a single-player game. The PC launch was rocky, with crashes from memory management and shader stuttering, but Nixxes' later patches left the port in a very solid, well-scaling state. Today it's a good example of a port "made with care," with dynamic resolution scaling options and support for several upscaling technologies.
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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 +46% free FPS.
Model Quality
Controls the level of detail (LOD) of character models, machines, and vegetation at medium-to-long distances. Decima automatically generates staggered detail levels, and dropping from Ultra to Medium noticeably reduces geometry load without it being too noticeable except in close-ups.
Screen Space Reflections
Horizon Zero Dawn's SSR is used heavily on water surfaces and wet metal, both very present in the open world, and its per-pixel calculation is expensive at high resolutions. Lowering it to Medium reduces the internal resolution of the reflection buffer without eliminating reflections entirely.
Cloud Quality
Decima's volumetric cloud system recalculates lighting and density in real time and is one of the heaviest GPU loads in the game at a distance, especially in outdoor scenes with open skies. On Ultra the impact is disproportionate compared to the visual improvement.
Anti-Aliasing
The game uses a Decima-specific TAA variant with several temporal quality levels. The highest level adds extra sampling-resolution cost that pays off little compared to Medium, especially if you're already using DLSS or FSR, which bring their own temporal smoothing.
Ambient Occlusion
Horizon Zero Dawn's ambient occlusion reinforces contact shadows on vegetation and structures, but on Ultra it enables extra sampling that especially penalizes areas with dense grass. Medium preserves visual depth in most scenes.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Textures on Ultra demand considerably more VRAM due to the detail maps on machines and vegetation, which can cause streaming stutter on GPUs with little memory. On High the visual impact is minimal and it avoids the VRAM bottleneck on 6-8GB cards.
Shadows
Decima's cascaded shadow maps cover a wide radius around Aloy and are constantly recalculated because of moving vegetation and the day/night cycle. Lowering to Medium reduces the resolution of distant shadow maps.
Motion Blur
Per-object and camera motion blur adds an extra post-processing pass with low but measurable cost, and many players disable it also out of visual preference and to reduce perceived input lag in combat.
Depth of Field
Depth of field is applied during dialogue and exploration for cinematic focus, but its bokeh calculation gets more expensive the higher the level. Lowering it to Low keeps the effect in cutscenes without penalizing general gameplay.
Level of Detail
This general slider affects the distance at which Decima starts degrading terrain and secondary-object geometry. On Medium, pop-in is somewhat more noticeable on the horizon, but CPU and GPU load drop together.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 2
+35% FPSAdded via patch after launch, DLSS works especially well in Horizon Zero Dawn because of the amount of fine vegetation detail that native TAA tends to blur. In Quality mode it offers an image practically indistinguishable from native with a notable performance jump.
AMD FSR 2
+28% FPSFSR 2 also arrived in a later update and uses temporal reconstruction similar to DLSS, making it the best option for AMD or Intel GPUs. In fast motion it can show a bit more ghosting in foliage than DLSS, but it's still far superior to native dynamic resolution scaling.
Dynamic Resolution
+15% FPSA native system since launch that adjusts internal resolution in real time to maintain a target FPS. Useful as a safety net on very limited hardware, though it offers worse image quality than DLSS or FSR 2 at equal performance.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable DLSS in Quality mode before touching shadow or cloud settings: on RTX GPUs it usually gives more FPS than any combination of lowered sliders.
- •On Pascal and Turing cards without dedicated latest-gen Tensor cores, prioritize lowering Cloud Quality and SSR before Texture Quality if you have 8GB of VRAM or more.
- •Use Reflex if your GPU supports it (RTX 20 onward) to reduce latency in fights against machines, especially noticeable with a controller or high-Hz mouse.
AMD
- •FSR 2 is the go-to option on Radeon; enable it in Quality mode before sacrificing Model Quality or Shadows.
- •RDNA2 and newer GPUs handle Ambient Occlusion well on High, but SSR remains the most cost-effective setting to lower at 1440p/4K.
- •Update to the latest Adrenalin drivers: Nixxes released several AMD compatibility patches after launch that fixed specific RDNA performance drops.
Sistema
- •Install the game on SSD: the texture and geometry streaming of Decima's open world generates visible stuttering on HDD, especially when fast traveling.
- •Let shader compilation finish on first launch after every driver update; skipping it is the most common reported cause of microstuttering in forums.
- •With 16GB of RAM the game runs comfortably; with 8GB you may notice hitches from asset streaming in dense zones like Meridian, so close background processes if that's your case.
5. Known game issues
Memory-management crashes at launch
The original August 2020 version suffered frequent unexpected crashes caused by faulty memory allocation, especially on systems with more than 8 cores or specific RAM configurations.
Estado: Patch 1.05 (September 2020)
Shader compilation and stuttering after driver updates
After updating GPU drivers or following game patches, the first session recompiles the shader cache and can cause occasional hitches during the first minutes of play; this is expected behavior, not a persistent bug.
Incompatibility with third-party overlays
Some capture or monitoring overlays (older versions of MSI Afterburner/RTSS, certain recording overlays) have caused intermittent freezes or FPS drops; disabling or updating them usually resolves the issue.
6. Frequently asked questions
Is it worth enabling DLSS or FSR in Horizon Zero Dawn?▾
Which setting should I lower first if my PC is struggling?▾
Why did the game crash so much at PC launch?▾
Is this game more CPU- or GPU-dependent?▾
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Calculate FPS for Horizon Zero Dawn →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →