Horizon Forbidden West PS5 Patch 1.16: 60FPS Performance Mode Finally Fixed! 

This has been some great post-launch support. They've earned a reputation of not abandoning issues, just like with Zero Dawn.

It's amazing how improving the fine detailed foliage etc just straight up makes the image look like it got a massive resolution boost.

This is such an interesting video, and I really appreciate this sort of content from Digital Foundry. As a player, I never really get to know the specific nitty-gritty details like these from patch notes and such. To me it's just "game looks better", but not "how we made it look better". It's so cool and so interesting to get an explanation like this (with comments from the game developer themselves!) to actually tell us how these improvements were made. I would also like to echo DF's credit to Guerrilla for putting in the work and making such a huge improvement to the image quality. I had honestly given up that they were going to fix it, and then they just knocked it out of the park with this update. A huge "wow!" and a big thank you to all the people at Guerrilla for making the changes in this patch. I'm on my New Game+ playthrough now and it looks and runs INCREDIBLE. This is the kind of support I love to see from my favorite game developers! :)

I decided to give the performance mode a go after the patch and my mind has been officially blow. The performance mode looks basically on par with the resolution mode it's hard to tell the difference but the 60FPS feels sooo good. Amazing they managed to get the game to look this good and play as well as it does it's actually incredible. Well done Guerilla!

There are plenty of games that receive a lot of support post launch, but few studios are like Guerrilla and put extra effort in using this support to improve the game.

Excellent, fascinating video. Great to hear what exactly has changed over the past six months directly from the developers.

I have a lot of dizzines trouble playing on 30 fps, but playing Ratchet on 40 FPS was fine, and the graphics were much better than 60 fps. Gonna wait to try out NG+ Horizon on 40 FPS

Bravo Guerrilla Games. Bravo. Outstanding job. And thank you DF for allowing us to appreciate just how much work went into this patch.

It's pretty amazing to see a developer listen and take feedback to heart.... Guerilla has been fulfilling even some of the most mundane of community requests.

This game is ridiculously gorgeous on PS5 on an OLED 😍 Great video

the original unpatched resolution mode looked way better and sharper

The game that Elden Ring made everyone forget about.

I just started playing and I was wondering how I wasn't really seeing any graphical issues in the performance mode, turns out I was playing the fixed version from the start. Game is absolutely gorgeous and works fantastically.

Man, imagine if every developer put so much care and attention into the development and support of their games. The gaming landscape would be such a better place.

They did a great job here. I was very upset with how it looked on launch. It looked extremely low in resolution. This now looks like quality mode but in 60fps.

Performance mode looks absolutely beautiful after the latest patch. I was playing since launch on resolution mode because it looked much better than performance to me. But now I can finally play it on performance it looks as great as resolution mode now.

These are the kinds of videos I just love getting notified about. Always appreciate your work, and the Horizon games are especially close to my heart when it comes to beauty and performance. I'm one of the lucky ones who isn't very far into the games yet, so this update makes me extremely happy!

I never really had any major issues with my play through but I'm glad to see new players can play with this enhanced patch. Thank you DF! I'll enjoy this when I do my Ultra Hard play through.

I look forward to trying 40hz mode. I've learned that when playing on 120hz tvs or monitors, 40fps modes are actually not bad at all. 30 does feel too slow for me, but 40 is enough to give more illusion of smoothness that 60 brings, but more flexibility to dial graphics up further.....It's why i also truly appreciate what steam deck has done with their variable refresh rate update for doing same there as well and using 40 or 50hz mode instead of 60..

I came back after 1.16 and its like night and day.. Now it really feels like next-gen

Love Guerrilla games, they always follow through and take the use feedback to heart. Love the studio, even for Horizon zero dawn for PC, they keep updating game even after a year. Which shows the best practices for a long running studio which fans and user relay on.

Sony wasn't lying when they said they didn't allow GG to crunch. That's why there us still a few bug issues. Still a great game and the best out currently.

I congratulate guerilla for looking into these issues and fixing them. There are many devs that just let them go after the initial buzz

Fantastic work by Guerrilla and awesome analysis by John. I'm glad I decided to put down the game a few hours into it, instead of returning it. Starting it over has been a much better experience this time around.

Performance mode does look SO much better now, I used to only use it for combat but now I use it most of the time. Fantastic work by Guerrila!

I appreciate how well this game runs and how stunning it looks. Breathtaking!

1.16 basically a gamechanger，especially on big screen, i can finally continue this game and waiting VRR the same time.

They were never using just one frame from history to generate their reprojected image. In my captured footage from about a month after launch, I was able to recognize ghosting artifacts persisting for 8 frames. Which makes sense. With checkerboard, if you only use the previous frame, you have essentially no AA at all. With checkerboard, each frame renders half the pixels, so two frames gives you full native resolution, but no AA. AA requires reprojection from earlier frames that rendered the same pixels you're currently rendering. So for checkerboard, the bare minimum you need to achieve temporal AA is the current frame plus the last 3 frames. This gives you the look of 2xAA. If you include reprojection from 8 frames total, that gives you the look of 4xAA, which is much more reasonable for TAA.

One of the most beautiful games ever made. Now if only they could patch Aloy’s personality.

I was blown away by how clean it looked. Nice job GG

These kind of videos are the very essence of Digital Foundry. Kudos to DF and Guerrilla for their amazing game

Wow that is a pretty significant improvement. They did an excellent job with fixing that shimmer(which, if we are all honest, was pretty rough).

Thanks for the video, great job going over the patch. This game has been on my list to play since it was announced, but as always with games it pays to be patient. After the initial wave of fabulous reviews that never mentioned anything about this shimmering issue, the community at large immediately complained about it. As you said, it’s really too bad it was released in original configuration. It is impossible for this to be unnoticed by the studio. If the disc goes on sale for Christmas I may buy it then, or I may wait until next year.

Performance mode looks so good now. Many thanks for the video and all the details. Very interesting and highly appreciated. The game is now the ps5 showcase in 60 fps I was looking for. Really looking forward now to the VRR patch.

Nice! I'll hang on and wait for the 40hz mode. Very interested to see how well that works.

And people tried to tell me that their version was perfect and that the shimmering didn't exist...

I’m am so excited for the 40hz mode and for VRR support!

Props to Guerrilla for doing the impossible! HFW feels amazing now in performance mode. Easily the best-looking game of all time. Thank you! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

I stopped playing early on due to the shimmer, it really did my head in. I've just recently started it again and I'm happy with the changes, I think I can now see this through to the end eventually. All the things you can adjust with the UI is also welcome. Good job Guerilla.

I noticed how good performance mode looked immediately after the patch install. Super happy with the support and loving my time with the game.

What Guerrilla have done here is simply incredible, they deserve all the praise they can get

Are we all going to ignore how Digital Foundry purposely didn't mention any shimming on performance mode when they did their initial review. Barely any RU-vidr mentioned how bad it really looked except for a few like Gaming Tech

This patch is amazing. Finally I'll be able to play this game after so long. John's analysis is also amazing.

Took you guys long enough to finally address this issue. Would've been nice to let us know during your first video during the game's launch. Glad we had some smaller youtubers such as @GamingTech to continuously bring this issue forward and held Guerilla accountable for the disastrous performance mode.

they did a fantastic job on the new patch. The visuals on performance mode or a noticeable Improvement. Still the best-looking game of this console generation, and the best game of the year so far.

That explanation of how they changed the way reconstruction worked was so interesting I love that you contacted the developers about this. Also can we say Guerilla have managed come up with a temporal upscaling method rivaling DLSS given how close the image quality of the 60 fps performance mode now to the resolution mode?

I have to hand it to Guerilla Games, they really are amazing - especially when it comes to the dedication to optimising and improving their games. I was put of by the shimmering in Forbidden West after watching many videos on the issue but they've clearly fixed it now. They also have done an amazing job with the PC version of Zero Dawn with DLSS and FidelityFX implementations and all round solid performance improvements.

Now the question is John: why didn’t you highlight the issues with the performance mode in your original review? I really need to know why.

Actually, the best graphics game... for now.

its clearly visible after the last patch, how much room for emprovement was possible in the performance mode. In my opinion DF completely missed out on positivily influencing the development and pointing out the technical flaws as usual. Would have been nice to see some productive critic on the performance mode in the first tech review instead of being fine with recommending 4k30 (with blackframe incertion) for a high action first party studio game, and talking about a switch in development, we're it comes more and more visible that a performance version seems not feasible any more. I pray and hope they will stick to deliver high performance modes including vrr support and fsr 2.0 in the future. As huge fan, thank you so much guerrilla games for fixing this! Horizon always pushed technical boundaries and the presentation was superb! Until the release of forbidden West. I can finally enjoy the game as I hoped it would have looked out of the box. But better now then never... I am in awe of the lod and the inviroment, nothing has come close to this staggering amount of detail! (which now can even shine in performance mode! )

That noise was unacceptable and should have been pointed out much fiercer by Digital Foundry in the first place

I completely agree with John that it's so important to applaud the post-launch developer support this game has received, and with even more to come like the 40fps mode. Comparatively FromSoftware has shown no interest in improving the dire performance of Elden Ring. I'll now be purchasing Forbidden West and can't wait to see it in action!

The game was clearly rushed out. It was filled with bugs, bad pop in and a dreadful 60fps fidelity mode. I'm glad Guerrilla addressed the issues eventually despite John's recommendation to just play it in 30fps. Coming from someone who consistently praises 60fps and will highlight much less serious issues in other games, I found that analysis video very dubious.

We seem to live in a time when it’s best to play a new release a year after it comes out.

Nice to see that Gueriila didn't go too overboard with the new TAA and stuck with their 1 sample-frame method along with their custom FXAA pass. Though the intense and heavy Sharpening filter is quite obvious. It's also nice to see that they don't exclusively rely on TAA alone for the AA.

It’s so good I’m restarting the game to see this throughout. Performance mode is the most fluid experience and it looks just phenomenal now.

From a base PS4 user stand point, I can confirm that image quality and pop-in was greatly improve, I was kind of amaze how well it runs lookin that good.

I wish developers would stop with 30FPS modes. 30FPS is unusable in 2022, especially on OLED. It just look so choppy and nausea inducing. Focusing on a single 60FPS mode would also mean that mode gets all development time and is more polished than doing 2-3 modes.

I'm still on my first playthrough, so the improvement in clarity is very welcome! There are a few things I wish they'd fine tune though: The lights the machines cast on the ground (very noticeable when riding a mount) is ridiculously bright in broad daylight, and just looks plain wrong. Climbing feels 95% of the way there, but often Aloy will just fail to reach for a nearby handhold, or just fail to climb up on to solid ground because she isn't in the "right place". There are times when she grabs on to the bottom of a ladder or ledge, and her entire body clips through the geometry. I guess all these are minor things in the scheme of things, but I do feel like I've noticed more small annoyances in FW than I did in ZD.

This game looks fantastic now in performance mode. It looks so good in fact that I don’t really see the point of resolution mode anymore. Kudos to the developers

A shame it didn’t launch like this. The previous state of performance mode was unacceptable. Now it’s gorgeous.

The game definitely looks way better on performance mode after the patch. Hopefully they can fix the pop in issues next

Tested the update its a huge improvement. Now this is a showcase of the power of ps5. Picture is no longer blurry or shimmering but sharp 4k 60fps.

This was a great purchase especially when the developers keep shining the game up

This game is a majestic masterpiece of art and the most beautiful game ever produced so far on this planet. No one can show me a better looking game than this.

@4:07 all I can picture is the Dark Souls notification that pops up after you kill a Boss. “Shimmering Vanquished”

From memory this is the only post launch patch that actually improved performance, in any games I played

Wow it looks so much better! I bought the game when it came out but haven’t started playing it yet because life got in the way. I’m glad it’s patched to look this good now! Looking forward to playing it soon.

Switched to performance mode after the update. Image quality is amazing. Fidelity mode feels obsolete now.

What's so funny is that I just now started playing the game. Finished it on resolution mode the whole way. Then for the DLC I tried performance mode out and was blown away. It just looks way better. Were my eyes deceiving me?? I saw your older vid and looked online: seemed like a lot of people still preferred resolution mode. But I realize now that all of that was before this patch (that I never knew about because I played the game this year) and this video confirms my suspicion. As someone who usually prefers the fidelity.. performance mode for HFW is on another level. Bravo.

It's interesting, my GF and I got Horizon on launch day. The shimmering was so bad I couldn't play it on my 65 inch OLED, meanwhile my GF barely noticed/beat the whole game in a few weeks. Now that they deployed this the update I'm all in and loving the game.

Horizon Forbidden West is so much fun! Great to see updates from Guerrilla 👏👏👏🙌

Performance mode is infinitely better looks like quality mode now but 60fps 👏

I agree; Guerilla deserves major kudos for such a fantastic post launch support. I just hope the next patch, does not come with even more weapon and braced shot nerfs!

Bravo Guerilla! Although there have been almost 4 months after the release, they fixed the problems and now the game plays better than ever!

Thanks for the Video. I am just wondering why DF never analyzed the worse performance mode in the first place?

Thank you John, I literally held off for this patch. I ran into too many bugs but mostly the performance mode looked straight awful and I couldn't believe they thought it was acceptable.

The improvements in the latest patch came at a cost: now the water flow in rivers seems less dynamic (4:02; 5:55; 9:50).

Note on comparisons: Before patch results should be on the left side of the screen, After patch results should be on the right side of the screen. Eyes go left to right, not right to left. NOT the other way around. Please consider this model for future videos where comparisons are used.

Going to be very interesting to see when they fully lean into PS5 hardware instead of having to hold back for PS4 cross gen (which was barely performant anyway).

Great video as always, although I don't understand why it's just in 1080p. Is YT really that slow with processing 4k these days (it's been more than 3 hours since the upload) or was this uploaded in just 1080p?

Shame it did launch at this state for a cross gen game that that was delayed

2:54 lol they were really like, "let's just swap him to be black, no one'll notice" XD

Performance mode was always a better option on ps5 imo. 60fps>30fps. Resolution mode at launch was terrible. The frame pacing, and over all character "heaviness" was unbearable in my opinion. I have no idea how you played that way. I thoroughly enjoyed it and even earned platinum in performance mode. I'm glad to see they have made it even better. NG+ when they add 40fps mode 👍🏻

I love that they made such a big improvement but seriously this should always have been a priority. Nobody plays games in 30fps anymore. The 60fps presentation is the only one that matters. True 4k is indistinguishable from high quality upscaling (like we see here) to most people anyway. And if you go "but muh 4k" then fuck right off. You're the reason why 30fps modes are somehow still tolerated.

The team at Guerilla have done an absolute amazing job at polishing resolution and performance in performance mode. I can't tell the difference between Res mode and Performance mode (except for the FPS of course), at the naked eye (and even with my prescription glasses) I really can't find the difference. I'm sure the difference is somewhere, but I got tired of looking for it, great job Guerilla, this game looks amazing.

I've seen that shimmery effect in foliage & stuff in MANY MANY 4K games over the years & it's cool that they actually bothered to fix it. I always thought it was just a side effect of it being a video game & something that was unavoidable...

Gorilla continues to put the industry to shame showing that it is entirely possible to put out quality product and correcting potential issues in timely fashion ...definitely head and shoulders above the rest

It's a shame it launched the way it did, but their response has been fantastic. Great job by the team.

This is why I had zero issues plunking down $70 on the game - they did an amazing job on Zero Dawn, but have exceeded that here. Bravo.

Great job Guerrilla Games, I´m having a blast of time playing this game with this patch.

Just started playing this game, I don't see how anybody can play this on 30fps. All the movement feels so muddy. Couldn't even see a difference between performance and resolution mode

I’m totally fine with your assertion that Guerilla Games have done a great job with post launch support and fixes. What I’m not fine with is just how little this was mentioned on your initial review; I bought this at launch, partly based on your glowing launch review, and literally shelved it until this patch because the shimmer was so bad. There’s also no mention in this video about the HDR luminance issues when camera panning in resolution mode. Both of those issues, on launch, were glaringly obvious and it’s extremely disappointing that Digital Foundry, who have a reputation of being the harshest and fairest technique critics, didn’t do anything to make people aware of the problems.

Now I can truly and 100% enjoy this game at 60 FPS. It was already a pleasure, but with so much detail in the PS5 version, the noise could be even harder on the eyes. This is everything we wanted, and needed. Well done Guerrilla! And thank you DF.

I like the note about wind intensity as I was wondering for a second if that was changed as well. Detailed work as always John.

Honestly this patch is amazing. I didn’t think they would be able to fix the image quality so effectively at this point. It’s incredible what developers can do when they actually care. If only fromsoft cared about giving elden ring a stable frame rate…

IMO: This game is NOW the best looking game of the generation.

This patch completely rekindled my interest in the game, I've been addicted to it the last few days and absolutely love it now! Guerilla deserve a lot credit.

John, it's def great they fixed it - ... however ... just ... maybe it shows that it wasn't ready in the first place? I literally had fewer issues playing ER on ps5 even with the stutter vs H2 with the image shimmering. At 60' it was giving me a headache after 30min as H2 is all about foliage. So they really f it up.. ER has issues and def some notable frame drops, but not as bad as I was expecting + the image was much more stable to look at.

What I want to know now is: where are the people saying that this was impossible to fix without entirely remaking the game and that the image quality was perfect and we were just being nitpicky?