Horizon Forbidden West launched on PC on March 21, 2024 — over two years after the game initially came out on the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. That’s quite the wait, but the original Horizon Zero Dawn was well-received and PC gamers have been waiting for their preferred release. Nvidia provided us with a code for testing the game, as this is an Nvidia-promoted title, but don’t worry: We’ve tested it on the best graphics cards and it doesn’t seem to outright favor Team Green’s hardware, other than the inclusion of DLSS 3 frame generation but not AMD’s FSR 3 alternative.
As a PC port, Horizon Forbidden West was initially created for and optimized to run on AMD hardware — the PlayStation 5 has a Zen 2 8-core CPU and 36 RDNA 2 compute units, while the PS4 version had to make do with far less capable hardware. The PlayStation 5 has 16GB of shared GDDR6 memory with 448 GB/s of bandwidth. Unlike the Xbox Series X, the PS5 memory isn’t partitioned into CPU and GPU segments, which means games can easily utilize up to the full 16GB for textures and other data, though in practice most seem to top out at around 12GB of memory use. That will prove to be an important consideration in terms of what settings and resolutions you can comfortably run on PC hardware.
Intel Core i9-13900K
MSI MEG Z790 Ace DDR5
G.Skill Trident Z5 2x16GB DDR5-6600 CL34
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G 4TB
be quiet! 1500W Dark Power Pro 12
Cooler Master PL360 Flux
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit
GRAPHICS CARDS
Nvidia RTX 4090
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super
Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super
Nvidia RTX 4070 Super
Nvidia RTX 4070
Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB
Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti
Nvidia RTX 4060
Nvidia RTX 3080 10GB
Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB
AMD RX 7900 XTX
AMD RX 7900 XT
AMD RX 7900 GRE
AMD RX 7800 XT
AMD RX 7700 XT
AMD RX 7600 XT
AMD RX 7600
AMD RX 6800 XT
AMD RX 6700 XT
Intel Arc A770 16GB
Intel Arc A750
