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Horizon Forbidden West Graphics Comparison: PS4 vs. PS5

While I admire them for sacrificing resolution in favor of fidelity (something Insomniac and Bluepoint shouldve done instead of targeting native 4k 30 fps), I dont agree with your overall thesis.

AC Unity was a 900p game running at sub 30 fps so its pixel budget was roughly around the 1080p cb Horizon FW is putting out. Doesn't really mean it has any effect on the PS5 tbh. I mean the PS5 is still native 4k 30 fps. It is wasting a lot of precious GPU power rendering pixels instead of introducing new visual features that make it stand out even more. What they have done is basically the equivalent of low vs high PC settings we have had since well, forever in the PC world. The game still has LOD pop-in issues when traversing on foot, let alone when flying. Fog is everywhere even on the PS5 version. Instead of wasting half the GPU rendering pixels, they shouldve focused on better LOD management by utilizing the PS5 IO and more visibility and reduced fog among other things like ray traced reflections or at least ray traced Ambient Occlusion and Shadows which makes a massive difference to foliage quality as seen in Dying Light 2.

What they have done here with the PS5 version is good, but not exceptional. Hopefully, their next game will also target 1440p or 4kcb and push visual fidelity instead of pixels like they do for the base PS4 version.
Cant a argue with that ..although I bet with RT and improvements to AO and RT, they wouldn't have been able to achieve 1440p/60
 

kyliethicc

Member
If the PS5 Pro exists somewhere right now in Cerny's lab, it's entire purpose should be to run this game's 4K 30 mode at 4K 60.

Otherwise, don't even bother Mark. Just make Knack 3.
 

kevm3

Member
What they're getting out of the base ps4 is extremely impressive... but it also tells me that the ps5 is being held back to keep these games cross platform.
 
It’s significantly less of a difference than cod advanced warfare ps3 vs. ps4.

Ps4 version of fat faced cave woman got the most attention.
 

ryzen1

Member
Well, even on PS4 it looks better than most of the other games out there.
I guess, they did a pretty good job anyways
 

emivita

Member
PS4 version looks excellent, probably the best looking PS4 game out there until a certain Ragnarok comes out. PS4 only owners won't miss too much, really. This is a fine example on how to make cross-gen games, literally the opposite of CP2077.
 

MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
PS4 version looks excellent, probably the best looking PS4 game out there until a certain Ragnarok comes out. PS4 only owners won't miss too much, really. This is a fine example on how to make cross-gen games, literally the opposite of CP2077.

It's because GG targeted PS4 and scaled up to PS5. CDPR targeted a 3000$ PC and tried to scale down to PS4. For PC users? Brilliant. For console users? Trash.
 
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Dick Jones

Gold Member
If the PS5 Pro exists somewhere right now in Cerny's lab, it's entire purpose should be to run this game's 4K 30 mode at 4K 60.

Otherwise, don't even bother Mark. Just make Knack 3.
Why Dont We Have Both GIF
 

MikeM

Member
Yes, its why my eyes rolled back when people were insinuating this is representative of the PS5s caperbilities.

People need to understand the impact of the base platform everything is designed around its limitations.

This is not saying its bad though its not.
FW on PS5 is being treated like a PS4 pro 2, not a new generation game.

It has me hopeful for full current gen games, where they are designing the game with SSD, zen2 cores, mesh shaders etc at there foundation.

UE5 is amazing tech, but it is rather general purpose.
Yep. No way is this engine coded to take advantage of primitive shaders. I’m excited to see the effect they have on future games.
 

assurdum

Banned
It's fundamentally graphically the same, it's a last generation game which is what everyone with a modicum of common sense was saying all along. You obviously had the PS fanboys claiming it looked as good as the Hellblade 2 footage, as laughable as that sounds now it was many posters on here saying just that. I'm getting this probably unless it turns out average (unlikely IMO).

Looks exactly the same lmfao

Cracking Up Lol GIF
 
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Moonjt9

Member
Good to see VFX back shitting up tech threads with horrendous takes masquerading as expert analysis. I kinda missed it tbh.

On topic, ps5 version looks awesome. But you got to give it to Guerrilla for making a fantastic PS4 version. What a studio. Can’t wait to see what they do with a ps5 only game next.
 
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Three

Member
I think he was making a point comparing certain assets on PC version of the first game to PS5 version of the second one. Either way, nobody is comparing first game running on PS4 to the new game running on PS5.
Nope he was trying to say the PC version of HZD will look similar or better than HFW on PS5. People called him crazy. Then he came back here in this thread and doubled down:

Yup. People looked at me like I was crazy when I said the PC version of HZD would look similar or better than the PS5 version. I knew the graphics engine was going to be the same for HFW therefore not much new features

The first screenshot is HZD on PC as far as I can tell.
 
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Nope he was trying to say the PC version of HZD will look similar or better than HFW on PS5. People called him crazy. Then he came back here in this thread and doubled down:



The first screenshot is HZD on PC as far as I can tell.
Hzd doesn't look that shitty on my PC.
 
I think he was making a point comparing certain assets on PC version of the first game to PS5 version of the second one. Either way, nobody is comparing first game running on PS4 to the new game running on PS5.

Which assets in HFW are worse than the ones in the PC version of HZD? Seems like everything was pretty much upgraded in HFW.
 
All these replies just chiming in to say it doesn't look good on their PS5 because it is also on PS4 sicken me.

There's nothing constructive in that, it's the same as port begging for me. (albeit the total opposite of port begging the input, post lenght and kind of contribute is the same - and makes me avoid these kinds of threads despite the theme being interesting)

Do kindly f*** off.

EDIT: Game looks mighty fine on PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5. And it's truly the best they could do as of 2022 on each platform. I don't think it was held back much and this whole conundrum is as stupid as being a PC gamer and crying the game isn't tailor made to run only on your RTX 3090ti, because you have one - your issue being that it runs on weaker hardware. Despite the fact it already DOES look (significantly) better on your top tier hardware than elsewhere.

Bunch of man-childs with a one track mind, game could look CGI and you could still find a place with obvious polygonal geometry in the distance and blame the PS4 for it.
 
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MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
Nope he was trying to say the PC version of HZD will look similar or better than HFW on PS5. People called him crazy. Then he came back here in this thread and doubled down:

I'm not going to defend him, he can do it himself by doing a proper comparisons of different assets / textures.

The first screenshot is HZD on PC as far as I can tell.

I played it on PC at max settings 4k and the game looks nothing like on this screenshot. It's actually quite an attractive looking game. Boring but attractive. Just like my ex.
 
Which assets in HFW are worse than the ones in the PC version of HZD? Seems like everything was pretty much upgraded in HFW.
I think they meant "aspects"
I think the water probably looks a lot worse since it's older tech.
The water for sure looks better. Honestly everything looks better in the sequel as it should. Does it look better for technical reasons though? Like is the AO, AA, and so on better? No clue. Hfw sure looks great though.
It looks like both images are highly compressed thumbnails but you can go there and take a screenshot on your PC if you like. Then we can wait to get a high res screenshot from the PS5 version
Yeah I opened them up and they both look like shit. I just know the rocks and so on actually have some detail on them unlike in this picture.
Also Ugh my wife is doing 4 days of online training and we only have the one computer. She keeps changing my chair around and even moves the arms in every direction. Takes me like an hour to get the chair how I like, and then it's time for bed so I just fix the chair for her to mess it up again in the morning.
 

GymWolf

Member
Decima is my fav engine now. Seeing what it does in Death Stranding and this.
The cinematics and landscapes... I would love "Fuel 2" game with that. I used to spend hours roaming around looking at the views. I like doing the same in Death Stranding but I wish there was "no bts" mod
Soners are gonna hate me for this, but the only pet peeve i have with the engine is how human enemies are animated\react to being hit\lack of ragdoll.

It was absolute shit in horizon1, it was absolute shit in ds, and from what i saw, it is almost the same shit in h2, maybe slightly better reaction when they get hit by the spear.

What make me perplexed is that guerrilla was one of the best deve when it comes to punchy human combat, hit reaction and how they fall down.


The difference between how enemies get dismounted by horses in rdr2 and how they get dismounted in h2 is literally a gen apart, and i'm not even exagerating, they are that bad and gamey as fuck.

When people are gonna play the game and use melee\killing enemies on horse dinobots are gonna notice what i'm noticing.

This was a huge problem for me in horizon 1 and seems like guerrilla really gives 2 fucks about it.
My only hope is that almost every footage shows very few of these moments because they do cuts etc. and gif are framey and accelerated so maybe animations are gonna feel a bit better while playing the game, but i have clinical eye for this shit so i'm ready to be disapponted.

Kingdom of amalur from ps3 era has more punchy and believable melee combat with good ragdoll ffs.

P.s. i know that some people gives 2 fucks about this stuff but tlou2 combat is kept is such an high pedestal for these exact things so...

P.P.s. of course binobots are wonderfully animated, although they still use precanned death animations, probably to save on the cpu.

p.p.p.s the blood cloud effect is probably the worse i ever seen in my life, it looks so bad coming from such detailed models.
 
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Three

Member
I'm not going to defend him, he can do it himself by doing a proper comparisons of different assets / textures.
That's up to him but he will probably fail at that too, even cherrypicking textures. high res texture assets are not about the engine anyway which is what he's referring to. He flat out said

"the PC version of HZD would look similar or better than the PS5 version. I knew the graphics engine was going to be the same for HFW therefore not much new features"

Referring to HFW on PS5. Nothing about particular aspects, particular textures or anything.
 
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Vick

Gold Member
I think they meant "aspects"

The water for sure looks better. Honestly everything looks better in the sequel as it should. Does it look better for technical reasons though? Like is the AO, AA, and so on better? No clue. Hfw sure looks great though.
It's basically all covered in the DF video, almost every technical aspect of the game saw a major overhaul in this sequel.

"the PC version of HZD would look similar or better than the PS5 version. I knew the graphics engine was going to be the same for HFW therefore not much new features"

Referring to HFW on PS5. Nothing about particular aspects, particular textures or anything.
This is what he said now. The original quote (from before Forbidden West was announced as cross-gen) said flat out better, not similar, and also that it would never achieve native 4K on PS5.

And now that the sequel is out and runs at native 4K or flawless 60fps, and looks a generation ahead of the first one in multiple ways despite only being cross-gen, he still had the audacity of saying Zero Dawn on PC offers a better graphical experience than the sequel on PS5 because it's 4K and 60fps at the same time (and by the way good luck finding a PC who can run the game at 4K and rock solid 60fps all the time).

Just let it go..
 
It's basically all covered in the DF video, almost every technical aspect of the game saw a major overhaul in this sequel.


This is what he said now. The original quote (from before Forbidden West was announced as cross-gen) said flat out better, not similar, and also that it would never achieve native 4K on PS5.

And now that the sequel is out and runs at native 4K or flawless 60fps, and looks a generation ahead of the first one in multiple ways despite only being cross-gen, he still had the audacity of saying Zero Dawn on PC offers a better graphical experience than the sequel on PS5 because it's 4K and 60fps at the same time (and by the way good luck finding a PC who can run the game at 4K and rock solid 60fps all the time).

Just let it go..
Actually none of it is covered in the DF video because they didn't compare it to PC version.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Y'all fighting over Forbidden West on PS5 vs Zero Dawn on PC.

Meanwhile I'm waiting for my PS4 order to ship :lollipop_smiling_hearts:
 

ethomaz

Banned
All these replies just chiming in to say it doesn't look good on their PS5 because it is also on PS4 sicken me.

There's nothing constructive in that, it's the same as port begging for me. (albeit the total opposite of port begging the input, post lenght and kind of contribute is the same - and makes me avoid these kinds of threads despite the theme being interesting)

Do kindly f*** off.

EDIT: Game looks mighty fine on PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5. And it's truly the best they could do as of 2022 on each platform. I don't think it was held back much and this whole conundrum is as stupid as being a PC gamer and crying the game isn't tailor made to run only on your RTX 3090ti, because you have one - your issue being that it runs on weaker hardware. Despite the fact it already DOES look (significantly) better on your top tier hardware than elsewhere.

Bunch of man-childs with a one track mind, game could look CGI and you could still find a place with obvious polygonal geometry in the distance and blame the PS4 for it.
Reading he thread gives you the complete opposite view of reality.

The game is stunning on PS5… looks better than R&C and it is in my #1 place as graphic looker this generation.
It is crazy how good it looks on PS5.

Nothing is perfect of course so there is a performance mode on PS5 that looks bad… it is too blurry, the CBR doesn’t help and the lack of resolution and tuned details to low makes it really looks ugly like the PS4 versions.

And there is the PS4 versions lol man they look bad… maybe it is because we moved to a new graphic level so the comparison changes… what was good few years ago is not today anymore.
It just not lower resolution and tuned details to low… it is missing graphical features… it is really a no go to play unless you have no option.

BTW it is the biggest difference between PS5 and PS5 versions a cross gen game showed this generation.

Well you will really be jaw dropping if you play in PS5 Quality mode… the other mode and PS4s modes are all way behind that one.

I can only dream what they could be done if it was not a cross-gen game… you can see some features tuned back due PS4 versions and so they archived something ahead everything in consoles right now.
 
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Apeopleman

Member
Good to see VFX back shitting up tech threads with horrendous takes masquerading as expert analysis. I kinda missed it tbh.

On topic, ps5 version looks awesome. But you got to give it to Guerrilla for making a fantastic PS4 version. What a studio. Can’t wait to see what they do with a ps5 only game next.
I agree! Can’t wait to see Guerilla Games take on SOCOM 5. I’m sure it’ll be a PS5 exclusive, and not cross gen.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
Whats weird is that the PC version HZD definitely loads faster than 13 seconds, especially when during fast travel which IIRC is only 3-4 seconds. I will check and update the numbers if I still have the game installed on my PC.

Now granted, I have a CPU that can hit 5.1 Ghz and the 7GBps 980 Pro so both faster than the PS5 CPU and SSD speeds but I dont have the IO block, and this is basically a PC port of a 5 year old game.

I think the fact that this game is shipping with so many bugs, lack of 40 fps mode, RT features, and slow loading means they probably ran out of time. They also have another game in development so it's possible that the studio had resources split between two games. They had also spent around six months fixing the PC version of HZD so its possible that they simply lacked the resources to add those features to the PS5 version. I expect them to be patched in the next few months.
The loading is probably CPU cache bound on HZD - and FW going by these times - which PCs with their true desktop CPUs will have a huge advantage IMO.

To be honest, I don't mind that they haven't exploited the hardware fully if they are happy with that as developers, the game looks good, and wasting an extra 11secs of my life on each reload - compared to the new benchmark Morales - plays into my day one value assessment, vs waiting for a fully patched GoY edition on disc.

My complaint is mostly about the game being little more than a charged Smart Delivery version at launch, while trying to pretend it is a PS5 game. Giving last gen lighting a Velocity Architecture styled name: 'hero lighting' really irks me, when they also want to charge £15/20 more for that, and going by the cinematic mode in Souls, it isn't the right choice vs frame-rate.

If they were to say: "this is a great game worth £70 on PS4 and PS5 because companies worth 5 times our value aren't bringing this content", then I'd be much happier with how they are operating, one price for a product designed for PS4, but that's not the direct talk we are getting and IMHO this is a far cry from how PlayStation respected its customers in the 2nd half of the PS3 gen.
 

OZ9000

Banned
It literally doesn’t though. By any objective measure.
I had a hard time pinpointing differences between the PS4 Pro and PS5 versions in the IGN comparison video.

The base PS4 model looks like vaseline smeared all over the screen.

Most of the assets including lighting and visual effects look the same across the PS4 and PS5 version.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
The loading is probably CPU cache bound on HZD - and FW going by these times - which PCs with their true desktop CPUs will have a huge advantage IMO.

To be honest, I don't mind that they haven't exploited the hardware fully if they are happy with that as developers, the game looks good, and wasting an extra 11secs of my life on each reload - compared to the new benchmark Morales - plays into my day one value assessment, vs waiting for a fully patched GoY edition on disc.

My complaint is mostly about the game being little more than a charged Smart Delivery version at launch, while trying to pretend it is a PS5 game. Giving last gen lighting a Velocity Architecture styled name: 'hero lighting' really irks me, when they also want to charge £15/20 more for that, and going by the cinematic mode in Souls, it isn't the right choice vs frame-rate.

If they were to say: "this is a great game worth £70 on PS4 and PS5 because companies worth 5 times our value aren't bringing this content", then I'd be much happier with how they are operating, one price for a product designed for PS4, but that's not the direct talk we are getting and IMHO this is a far cry from how PlayStation respected its customers in the 2nd half of the PS3 gen.
I get what you are saying but the game can be bought for $60 and upgraded for free. Now, Sony is being dicks about that and wont let you preload the PS5 version if you buy the PS4 digital edition, but thats just the new Sony. I agree that they are no longer the company that respected its consumer back in the day.

P.S They toned down the hero lighting significantly so the main feature they promised PS5 owners has been drastically cut back. It's just how things are run over there.
 

GooseMan69

Member
Most of the assets including lighting and visual effects look the same across the PS4 and PS5 version.

Ok, but they’re objectively not. PS5 has far more complex and dense geometry/vegetation, and the textures are significantly higher res and more detailed. It also has weather, particle, and water effects that aren’t seen on the PS4 version. Character models are more detailed, etc. the list goes on.

Watch the digital foundry video. He goes into detail about just how different the PS5 version is. And honestly, it’s pretty easy to spot yourself unless you’re on a phone or something. Even on my shitty iPhone 6 I could spot the differences. On a 4K tv, the difference was pretty significant. And that’s with youtube compression.
 
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