Horizon Zero Dawn is the first game to support AMD's FidelityFX Single Pass Downsampler (SPD), which enables more efficient GPU performance on AMD RDNA 2 and RDNA graphics cards by It speeds up texture mipmap creation. Now, why would Sony want to make its exclusive software compatible with RDNA 2? Call it a gut feeling, but I guess it is not developed to perform well enough on a PC.

Whatever the reason, SPD may not sound like a must-hit feature, but it actually serves to mitigate the effects of post-processing effects such as screen space reflections and bloom. Mipmaps are essentially multiple smaller versions of a single texture, used when high-resolution textures are not needed or when aliasing occurs due to size or angle.

FidelityFX SPD can generate 12 mip levels from a single 4k texture in a single pass, speeding up a process that normally requires synchronization for each new mipmap creation step. Since this is no longer necessary, SPD can now support asynchronous computations.

More importantly, however, the inclusion of this feature is a sign that support for AMD's own-brand GPU optimization suite, FidelityFX, has increased from day one in the latest games built specifically for RDNA.

This certainly bodes well for AMD and its upcoming desktop graphics cards, as both next-generation consoles are built using AMD's RDNA 2 architecture.

In that light, such a move to adopt RDNA-specific features would seem to hint at a PS5 remaster, or at least serve as a test bed for features soon to be introduced in consoles with RDNA 2 graphics. After all, Sony and AMD are working closely together on next-generation graphics technology, and there is no doubt that the relationship is somewhat symbiotic.

Other features included in Horizon Zero Dawn include: [The PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn is also touted as a DX12 Ultimate title, a mix of this former PS4 exclusive title for the PC This is a first for the Virtuous team. However, no details have been given as to what this will actually bring to the game, such as no support for ray tracing, so choosing an AMD card over a DX12 Ultimate-capable Nvidia RTX 20 series won't hurt much. [However, AMD has confirmed that RDNA 2 GPUs will fully support DX12 U. In other words, we can expect the next graphics cards, and the next generation of consoles, to support ray tracing, mesh shaders, sampler feedback, and variable rate shading.

However, there is one thing to be aware of regarding Horizon Zero Dawn. That is unstable launch dates and inconsistent performance.

As noted in my PC performance testing of Horizon Zero Dawn, performance does not seem to be uniform across the board, regardless of PC hardware performance. For example, my Nvidia RTX 2080 provided smooth enough performance for the most part, but in the Horizon Zero Dawn review, Dave Meikleham struggled to get passable performance from the much more powerful and expensive RTX 2080 Ti.

Thus, for the best chance at decent performance, we highly recommend upgrading to the graphics card's first day driver: Radeon Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.8.1 or Nvidia GeForce Game Ready 451.67.