It has been almost a year since Horizon Zero Dawn has received a patch for PC. The last major update was released back in January, which brought some bug fixes. Today, the developer Guerrilla Games surprised us with a brand-new patch.
Patch 1.11 added new features to the PC version of the game. Several improvements to the shader management system have been made as well.
Both Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution are now supported by the game. You can turn them on in the options menu. The patch removed the FidelityFX CAS option from the game, as it’s now outdated due to FSR addition.
The rest of the changes are mentioned below:
- Adjusted settings screen to facilitate the addition of DLSS and FSR.
- Render Scale option has been removed but the same result can now be accomplished by adjusting the setting Upscale Method to Simple and adjusting Upscale Quality.
- Improvement to the shader management system. This will result in a few noticeable differences:
- There is no longer a shader pre-compilation step on startup. The game will always compile shaders during loading and in the background.
- Stutters during gameplay that used to occur due to background shader compilation have now been significantly reduced.
- Because shader compilation is still happening in the background you may notice the game having a higher CPU utilization while that is happening.
- Loading screens will wait for the required shaders to be fully compiled. This may cause loading screens to take somewhat longer on certain systems.
- On higher spec machines with faster CPUs, the loading screens will typically be shorter, due to more efficient shader compilation that better leverages high-end CPUs.
You can check out the patch notes via the official Reddit post.
You can purchase Horizon Zero Dawn for PC via Steam and Epic Games Store. You can also purchase the game on GOG if you want the DRM-free version.
So what do you think? Are you interested in any of these changes? Have you played Horizon Zero Dawn yet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
