Eurogamer shared some thoughts on the powerful technology of Horizon: Zero Dawn, that allows it to show phenomenal visuals on various platforms.
Eurogamer and Digital Foundry always make great technical analysis videos about contemporary games. A couple of days ago the publication uploaded a very interesting video, that shows how awesome stuff could be done on PS4. This little flick shows the difference between PS4 and PS4 Pro versions of the game.
“Producing a sandbox game of this scale is not an insignificant task – many similar titles struggle to maintain solid performance during traversal as the CPU needs to stream in and decompress open world data on the fly, while continuing to process game logic and prepare instructions for the GPU. It’s for this reason that titles like Fallout 4 and Just Cause 3 can hitch and stutter when the player does nothing more than move from A to B through the environment. Crucially, Horizon Zero Dawn is immune to this issue – making your way through the open world is a super-smooth experience regardless of the PlayStation hardware you’re using.
Horizon’s excellent performance at checkerboard 4K vs the native 1080p of the base PS4 version is a great achievement. While the Pro hardware has 2.3x the GPU power of the standard model, memory bandwidth hasn’t scaled in step – and it’s rare that we see a PS4 engine scale so gracefully between 1080p on base hardware and 4K on Pro (checkerboard or otherwise). That Guerrilla has achieved this with no impact to performance is impressive enough, but the team has pushed the envelope here, handing in more visual enhancements over the base version of the game”.
Eurogamer
We expected no less from Guerrilla. This studio knows everything there is to know about PS4, so it’s pretty obvious that they’ve managed to solve the performance issue. It would be great to hear more about the way the technology behind this project works at GDC.