Another month, another patch for Horizon Zero Dawn on PC. Guerilla Games has been working tirelessly to get their baby to full working order after its Steam release went a little less than what we’d call “ideally.” After launching in August, the developers went into full damage control mode, stomping on bug after bug so that several months later the patch notes have shrunk to be just a few short lines rather than entire pages.
The last patch fixed an issue with an early quest and a bug that caused Aloy to walk at a slight angle compared to the camera, but a bug that prevented anisotropic filtering from working as intended remained elusive.
That bug has finally been squashed in patch 1.07 for Horizon Zero Dawn. Anisotropic filtering now works on all hardware configurations across the board. On top of that, Guerilla Games also rewrote the way HZD handles its shaders to improve performance.
"With Patch 1.07 the team has rewritten the way the engine deals with shaders and shader-optimization,” Guerilla Games wrote on their website. They removed the mandatory and unskippable step of shader optimization every time the game loads and changed it so that shader optimization runs in the background during the main menu. This can be skipped by simply loading into your game, at the price of slightly longer loading times as shaders are optimized later.
Shaders are also dynamically optimized during gameplay as well, but this happens in the background and shouldn’t hurt game performance.
There are still some known issues that Guerilla Games is working on. HDR still doesn't work for some hardware configurations, and they've also discovered that high-end CPUs with more than 16 cores are suffering more instability than other CPUs. They're still working on getting to the bottom of that issue, and we'll hopefully have good news closer to the end of the month judging by the frequency that Guerilla Games releases updates.
Source: Guerilla Games