Horizon Zero Dawn now offers frame-rate boosting Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR

Aloy looks up
(Image credit: Guerrilla Games)

Horizon Zero Dawn's recent 1.11 update has seen some important improvements that should lead to significant performance boosts for players still hooked on the 2017 action RPG. Not only does this include support for both AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), but some changes have also been made to the shader system. 

Previously, the game had only benefitted from Fidelity FX CAS—or Contrast Adaptive Sharpening—which isn't the greatest solution, often being found to make games look oversharp, as one Redditer summarises. Now, this tech has been replaced so that Horizon Zero Dawn fans can make the most of AMD's newer FSR tech, which sharpens much more subtly and effectively to give the illusion of playing a higher resolution.

The addition of Nvidia's DLSS tech also means those on the green team don't have to settle for the opposition's upscaling tech. So, whichever GPU you're packing, you should see some significant performance improvements with your preferred tech switched on.

See more

Some changes have also been made to reflect these new additions in the games UI, such as the omission of the Render Scale option. The patch notes explain that the "same result can now be accomplished by adjusting setting Upscale Method to Simple and adjusting Upscale Quality."

Your next machine

(Image credit: Future)

Best gaming PC: the top pre-built machines from the pros
Best gaming laptop: perfect notebooks for mobile gaming

This comes along with performance improvements that focus on the game's shader management system. Among the changes includes the ability for shaders to compile live in game, without the necessity of a pre-compilation step on startup. 

Stutters that had been known to occur due to background shader compilation have now been 'significantly reduced,' too, so it should no longer cause too much of a problem.

You can check out the rest of the improvements in the patch notes on the official HZD Subreddit.

Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been demystifying tech and science—rather sarcastically—for three years since. She can be found admiring AI advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. She's been heading the PCG Steam Deck content hike, while waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.