Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Forbidden West just got a Complete Edition port for PC. While players are enjoying the latest PC port, it has significant changes, including upgrades and downgrades compared to its PlayStation counterpart.
However, fans have pointed out one crucial feature that Horizon Forbidden West lacks on the latest PC port which was available on the PC versions of famous games including Alan Wake 2 and Battlefield 5. That feature is ray tracing.
Ray tracing is a graphics technique used on computers to simulate the behavior of light in the real world. The technique is used to generate realistic-looking images and real-time graphics. Apart from that it also improves immersion in video games.
Ray tracing missing in Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition
Given that the latest PC port lacks the ray tracing feature which the fans were hopeful about, naturally, the developers were asked about it. In an interview with Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia, the porting specialist at Nixxes as well as Guerrilla revealed their thought process behind not adding the feature.
Michiel Roza, principal optimization programmer for Nixxes confessed that ray tracing was actually considered. He says,
“It was definitely considered, and it’s good that you mentioned Shadow of the Tomb Raider. There, we had to do an entire lighting pass to get RT shadows to work. And for this project, with the hours of cinematics and the scope… we decided that the game already looks really good, there’s a strong direction here and we really didn’t want to mess with it.”
Jeroen Krebbers, the lead tech programmer at Guerrilla, adds how the game has a lot of content, and for them to add ray tracing would mean going through the whole game to make the addition. He says,
“Don’t forget a lot of the content is alpha-tested trees. I mean, a lot. Of course, we have settlements and some hard surfaces, but most of it is really hard to ray trace against, even for shadows. There’s a lot of content, maybe 100 square kilometers of content or more, and we’d need to go through the whole game… it’s just mind-boggling… obviously having the scalability between PS4 and PS5 meant that we wanted to focus on stuff that would work on both PS4 and PS5, which sadly excluded RT.”
That being said, Krebbers emphasizes that adding ray tracing is not an easy addition to the PC version. They do like tech and look forward to adding that in the upcoming games.
Compression scheme used in Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition
When the devs were asked about the decompression hardware used in PS5 and PS4 being missing in PC, they revealed that they used BypassIO, but not GPU decompression or GDeflate. To this, were asked about what compression scheme they actually use in Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition.
To this, Patrick Den Bekker, principal lead programmer, Nixxes, reveals,
“That’s actually one of the reasons not to support GPU decompression because it locks in your compression format, and GDeflate is very CPU-unfriendly. We’d love it if we could use decompression that works on both the CPU and GPU because there we could make it optional for the user. We therefore decided to use LZ4 which, I think, is very, very fast on the CPU.”
He further adds that GPU bandwidth is another issue. GPU scheduling issues tend to arise from using GDeflate, thus making the frame rate unpredictable.
