Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is out on Steam and Epic Games Store. For a trivial $10, owners of the base game can upgrade their copy to the Remaster for better visuals and advanced graphics technologies. Horizon Forbidden West was the very first game we analyzed and tested at PC Optimized, so this feels kind of special. It’s also our 49th Optimization Guide.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
- Enable Resizable BAR.
- Turn on Game Mode.
- Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
- Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
- Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
- Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
- Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
- Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered: PC System Requirements
720p 30 FPS (Very Low)
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Processor: Intel Core i3-8100|AMD Ryzen 3 1300X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4GB|AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB
- Storage: 135 GB SSD storage
1080p 60 FPS (Medium)
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-8600|AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060|AMD Radeon RX 5700
- Storage: 135 GB SSD storage
1440p 60 FPS (High)
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Processor: Intel Core i7-9700|AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070|AMD Radeon RX 6800
- Storage: 135 GB SSD storage
4K 60 FPS (Very High)
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
- Processor: Intel Core i7-11700|AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080|AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
- Storage: 135 GB SSD storage
Contents & Testing Methodology
- Benchmarks at a glance:
- Resolution & Graphics Presets.
- Texture Filtering & Shadows.
- Ambient Occlusion & Screen Space Reflections.
- LOD & Terrain Quality.
- FOV Scaling.
- Upscaling & Frame Generation.
- VRAM usage.
- CPU bottlenecks.
- Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Optimized Settings.
- Hardware setup used:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
- Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI MPG B650 Edge WiFi.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Resolution & Graphics Presets
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered scales decently with resolution, averaging 67 FPS at 4K, 85 FPS at 1440p, and 91.5 FPS at 1080p using the “Very High” quality preset with DLAA. There appears to be a CPU bottleneck at 1080p which we’ll have a closer look at near the end.
The five graphics presets show healthy scaling, averaging 97 FPS at the lowest, 80 FPS at medium, and 67 FPS at the highest quality preset at 4K.
Texture Filtering & Shadows
Texture filtering produces sharper textures by continuously sampling mipmaps visible to the player. Anisotropic filtering produces the best results, costing just a couple of FPS at the highest “16x” value.
Shadow Quality sets the resolution of shadow maps, producing clear or blurry boundaries depending on your setting. At the highest quality option, it can reduce performance by up to 16%. If you’re struggling to hit 60 FPS, consider dropping it to “Very Low.”
Ambient Occlusion & Screen Space Reflections
Ambient Occlusion renders shadows along objects’ edges, corners, and intersections, greatly increasing the scene depth at a trivial performance cost.
Screen Space Reflections produce reflections on glossy surfaces like water and glass. They nominally impact the game’s performance. That can, however, change around rivers, lakes, and water bodies.
LOD & Terrain Quality
The Level of Detail or LOD adjusts the number of objects in the scene. It is usually controlled by the polygon or instance count, adding additional detail at higher settings. The performance impact varies from subtle to medium, peaking at 8% at the highest option.
Terrain Quality increases the complexity of ground meshes, including rocks, pebbles, and stones, employing tesselation. The performance hit is nominal.
FOV Scaling
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered features a Field of View (FOV) slider that increases or decreases the player viewport by up to 25%. Increasing it can drastically improve the immersion at the cost of 4-5% lower framerates. We recommend setting it to at least +12%.
Screen Space Shadows render shadows for grass, shrubs, branches, ropes, cracks, and other linear objects missed by shadow maps. The performance impact is almost negligible.
The remaining graphics settings, including Cloud Quality, Hair Quality, Parallax Occlusion, and Transparency don’t notably impact performance.
Upscaling & Frame Generation
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered features three upscaling and two frame generation technologies. NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 3.1 produce very similar results, retaining almost all the visual details. Intel XeSS is the worst, losing a fair amount of detail, and performing slower than the rest. Even its “Ultra Quality Plus” mode which upscales the image by 1.3x looks worse than DLSS/FSR “Quality” mode even though it performs like native.
DLSS Frame Generation is limited to RTX 40 GPUs, while its FSR counterpart can be used on pretty much any device. We wouldn’t recommend pairing frame generation with FSR upscaling as it fails to produce a stable image. Upscaling and frame generation improve the average framerates by 25% and 41%, respectively.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered: VRAM Usage
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered uses over 14 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Very High.” Scaling down the settings reduces this figure to 10 GB at “Medium” and 9 GB at “Low.” Lower resolutions like 1080p and 1440p use between 12-13 GB of VRAM at the highest settings.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered: CPU Bottlenecks
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is surprisingly GPU-bound with an average Busy Deviation of 4-6% at 1080p “Very High.” Interestingly, the use of frame generation increases it to 10% at 4K.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Performance Summary
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is a well-optimized game and most of its graphics options scale linearly with quality. The most taxing settings include “Shadow Quality” and “Level of Detail” which can improve the average FPS by 16% and 7%, respectively.
Optimized Graphics Settings for Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered
| Optimized Settings | High-end | Midrange | Low-end PC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 4K (3840×2160) | 1440p (2560×1440) | 1080p (1920×1080) |
| FPS Target | 90 FPS | 60 FPS | 60 FPS |
| VSync | Off | On | Off |
| Texture Filtering | 16x | 16x | 16x |
| Shadow Quality | Very High | Very High | Low |
| Ambient Occlusion | SSAO | SSAO | SSAO |
| Screen Space Reflections | High | High | Off |
| LOD | Very High | Very High | Very High |
| Terrain Quality | Very High | Very High | Very High |
| Hair Quality | High | High | High |
| Cloud Quality | High | High | Low |
| FOV | +12% | +12% | 0% |
| Screen Space Shadows | On | On | On |
| Transparency | High Res | High Res | High Res |
| Parallax Occlusion | On | On | On |
| Motion Blur | Up to you | Up to you | Up to you |
| Bloom | Up to you | Up to you | Up to you |
| Upscaling | DLSS Balanced | DLSS|FSR Balanced | DLSS|FSR Balanced |
| Frame Generation | Off | Off | Off |
| CPU | Core i7-14700K|Ryzen 7 7800X3D | Core i5-13600K|Ryzen 5 7700X | Core i5-12400| AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| GPU | RTX 4070 Ti Super|RX 7900 XT | RTX 4070|RX 7800 XT | RTX 3060|RTX 4060|RX 6600 |
| Memory | 16GB (dual-channel) | 16GB (dual-channel) | 8GB (dual-channel) |
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered: Best Settings for Low-end PCs
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered runs well on low-end PCs. We recorded an average of 86 FPS at 1080p “Very High,” complemented by DLSS and frame generation. Older hex-core CPUs might run into a mild CPU bottleneck, and we recommend reducing the LOD to “Medium” to remedy that. Thanks to high-quality upscaling, even 1440p 60 FPS is attainable at the highest quality settings (with frame generation).
The Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster uses up to 11 GB of graphics memory at the highest quality settings at 1080p and 1440p. Upscaling or frame generation doesn’t help with the VRAM consumption, so check your GPU buffer before setting the texture quality.
| Optimized Settings | RTX 3060 | RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 4060 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 1080p|1440p | 1080p|1440p | 1080p|1440p |
| FPS Target | 80 FPS|60 FPS | 90 FPS|60 FPS | 90 FPS|60 FPS |
| VSync | Off | Off | Off |
| Texture Filtering | 16x | 16x | 16x |
| Shadow Quality | Very High | Very High | Very High |
| Ambient Occlusion | SSAO | SSAO | SSAO |
| Screen Space Reflections | High | High | High |
| LOD | Medium | Medium | Medium |
| Terrain Quality | Very High | Very High | Very High |
| Hair Quality | High | High | High |
| Cloud Quality | High | High | Low |
| FOV | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Screen Space Shadows | On | On | On |
| Transparency | High Res | High Res | High Res |
| Parallax Occlusion | On | On | On |
| Motion Blur | Up to you | Up to you | Up to you |
| Bloom | Up to you | Up to you | Up to you |
| Upscaling | DLSS Quality|Balanced | DLSS Quality | DLSS Quality |
| FSR Frame Generation | On | On | On |
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered: Best Graphics Settings for the Steam Deck
Our Steam Deck guide for Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered can be found here.
| Optimized Settings | Steam Deck OLED |
|---|---|
| Resolution | 1280×800 |
| FPS Target | 30 FPS|45 FPS |
| VSync | Off |
| Texture Filtering | 2x AF |
| Shadow Quality | Very Low |
| Ambient Occlusion | SSAO |
| Screen Space Reflections | Off |
| LOD | Very Low |
| Terrain Quality | Low |
| Hair Quality | Low |
| Cloud Quality | Low |
| FOV | 0% |
| Screen Space Shadows | Off |
| Transparency | Default |
| Parallax Occlusion | On |
| Motion Blur | Off |
| Bloom | Up to you |
| Upscaling | FSR Balanced |
| FSR Frame Generation | Off|On |
