Horizon Zero Dawn is best played on handheld gaming computers, thanks to its fresh remaster.

If you're an avid fan of Sony Horizon Zero Dawn, then you might have been worried that the new, remastered version was going to be too much for you gaming PC or handheld device. The fact that the remastered game isn't certified for Steam Deck doesn't help in this regard, but I'm confident that it will work on the Steam Deck after playing HZDR on my Asus ROG Ally X.

Nixxes Software, the PC porting company of Horizon Zero Dawn's developer, Guerrilla Games has done a fantastic job with the remaster. It's the exact same game, but the graphics aren't as good as Horizon Forbidden West.

It's now a feast of visual effects, high resolution textures, and gorgeous lighting. To ensure that it runs on as many PCs as possible you have the full range of upscalers, frame generation systems and more.

The remaster weighs 105 GB and is 33 GB bigger than the original PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn. The remaster isn't just about better textures. Characters and environments have also been reworked to look richer, while remaining true to the original.

The remaster is especially good for the larger cities, which look more like what one would expect from a world where nature has taken over. If you're like me and have played the original game a lot, many things will look familiar, but certain aspects may feel noticeably changed. The same furniture is still there, but it has been rearranged.

I haven't explored all regions yet, however my initial impressions of the machines are very positive. They look great with the highest quality settings.

All of the extra visual goodies come with a price, and if you turn up the quality settings to the max, you will see a significant drop in performance. You can use frame generation and upscaling to recover some frames. The first Horizon Zero Dawn only had FSR 2 & DLSS. Now you have the latest AMD, Intel & Nvidia systems.

FSR is AMD's shader based frame interpolater, and it's best of all that the version you get is decoupled from upscaler. If you have a Nvidia graphics cards that can run the game you will be able to upscale and frames generation, even if your card is not an RTX or RTX 40 series model.

The ROG Ally X would give me an average of 42 fps in gameplay when using the 'Original Quality' preset (aka, Low quality), with no upscaling. In the remaster the handheld only manages to achieve around 25 fps using the Low preset, and 30 fps when using Very Low.

With the Low Quality preset, you can get almost 60 fps. Even the 1% frame rates are more than 30 fps.

There are some flaws. While the surface reflections have improved, they are still screen space reflections, which can sometimes lead to some strange visuals. Not all textures are better either.

What you don't see is the inconsistent performance of the original. The remaster is much more consistent thanks to Nixxes, who managed shader compilation and assets streaming.

On my main PC with a Core i7-14700KF and RTX4080 Super, I have enabled DLSS Quality, and the game runs very well. However, I should note that I have not tested all areas.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered has enough options to cover most PC platforms.

You'll need to use Low or Very Low, along with some FSR upscaling, and frame generation. However, as the game isn’t fast-paced, the extra input lag caused by interpolation shouldn’t be a problem.

Sony, Guerrilla Games and , among others, have done a great job in making this remaster of Horizon Zero Dawn the best version it could be, short of an entire remake.