'Horizon Zero Dawn' on PC: How to Stop the Game From Lagging

The highly-anticipated arrival of Guerilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn is here, and for some, the PC port is everything they could ever hope for, but it turns out that that's not the case for everyone as some people, including those in the press, have reported that it has been nearly unplayable.

Nearly Unplayable

According to a report by RPS, some players experienced frequent crashes and occasional frame rate stutters during cutscenes.

Others had it worse as they were unable to maintain a steady frame rate despite using high-end processors and even the recommended GTX 1060 CPU. It's also been reported to stutter quite a lot, plus the Anisotropic Filtering settings aren't working for some people.

There are several other problems involving the Horizon Zero Dawn PC port, but then again, it's not happening to everyone.

Still, tons of people are finding it hard to like the PC port in its current state, but luckily, Guerilla Games has published its first-ever patch that aims to fix all these bugs--but some people continue to report the same problems, meaning the patch was unable to fix the issues.

How to Prevent Horizon Zero Dawn Lag Problem

Nevertheless, if your problem is lagging, GameRevolution has troubleshooting steps that you can follow to help make your gameplay experience better until the devs could fix all of the issues with Horizon's PC port and ensure everyone finally gets to experience the game in its full glory.

The first Horizon Zero Dawn PC lag fix is to close intensive background applications that are running, and you can do this by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, and then choosing the "Task Manager" option.

Once the menu opens, simply click on all unnecessary apps running, except for Steam and the game, and then click "End task."

You can also run the game in full-screen mode compared to windowed mode, as this could lower the chances of stuttering. You can easily do this on the game's Settings menu.

Another lag fix is to adjust the game's graphic settings manually. Here's how to do this:

• Go to the Settings menu in-game
• Reduce all the graphics settings to the lowest possible option.
• Increase one option and then return to your gameplay.

You can keep on doing this, increasing one option at a time to see which setting is causing the game to stutter. Once you've found the culprit, keep it in the lowest setting and then revert the other settings back.

Updating Your Drives

If all else fails, check your drivers and see whether it's updated, if it's not, it's the most likely culprit and will cause performance issues in almost all the games you have, not just with Horizon Zero Dawn.

With that, you'll want to update your AMD or Nvidia drivers.

For AMD users, you can visit the AMD website and then input your AMD component's details to see if there are any updates and download the latest one.

Basically, the same goes for Nvidia owners, but you'll want to navigate to the site's "Download Drivers" page to find the latest driver update for your specific Nvidia driver model.

This article is owned by TechTimes.

Written by: Nhx Tingson