Horizon: Forbidden West will have a ‘Performance Mode’

Recently we released a video comparing what a Simulated 60FPS might look like for Horizon: Forbidden West. Almost right after this video was released, Guerilla Games confirmed that the game will have a ‘performance mode’ that will offer a higher framerate. Fortunately, unlike other games during the PlayStation 5 era, it also appears this feature will release with the game.

During Julien Chièze’s interview with Guerrilla, the studio confirmed this feature. Other featured were also discussed but unfortunately for non-french speakers, there are no subtitles on the official video. Expectations are that Horizon: Forbidden West will also support a ‘fidelity mode’ with favors resolution over framerate but this was not discussed during the interview. This is a fair assumption however as the current trend on consoles is to do so.

Guerrilla Games chose to showcase the game last month using a more neutral 1080P at 30FPS, to the ire of many fans, hoping to see the power of the PlayStation 5 on full display. The company later released a video with 4K resolution still running at 30 frames.  Since the PlayStation 5 more than doubled the teraflops from the PlayStation 4 and is designed to use every one of them it was not logical to expect the game to run the same on both.

No, more likely PlayStation chose the settings due to the game’s cross-generation status.  2020 was a rough year to release a console. With CPU shortages still having a major effect on the industry even more importance is being placed on not leaving the games yet to upgrade behind. We can expect more emphasis placed upon this moving forward.

During a recent interview with Hermen Hulst, when asked about how PlayStation 4 was factored into PlayStation Studios’ vision he stated:

It very much is. You can’t build a community of over 110 million PS4 owners and then just walk away from it, right? I think that’d be bad news for fans of PS4, and frankly not very good business.

Moving forward we need to remember that not one but three consoles are factoring into the development of many games. If a game is shown using neutral settings we can assume that is the reason.

Horizon: Forbidden West is currently slated for a 2021 release. This could be subject to change in the future.

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