Welcome to the landmark 69th edition of DF Direct Weekly, our regular scheduled show where the team takes a break from their various projects to talk about the latest gaming technology news. This week’s offering kicks off with detailed impressions of Horizon Forbidden West’s 1.17 patch, introducing support for 120Hz features on PlayStation 5 including VRR (variable refresh rate) features for the performance mode and a ‘balanced’ alternative to the quality mode, running at 40 frames per second.
We were looking to produce come ‘bespoke’ content for this update because it’s actually rather good, but ultimately opted against it because what we’re essentially looking at here are some impressive HDMI 2.1-orientated add-ons to the 1.16 patch we’ve already looked at in depth. But before we go into the details, a warning: if you’ve got an older HDMI 2.0 display which does have 120Hz support, I’d recommend disabling the PS5’s 120Hz output, as you’ll likely be downscaling to 1080p to access the new features.
However, these new gameplay modes are compelling for those with the latest displays. The VRR mode transfers the game’s existing performance mode (complete with its excellent new TAA/checkerboarding combo) into the 120Hz domain, then unlocks the frame-rate. In general play, I noted general performance in the 60-75fps range (13.3ms to 16.7ms frame-times) which isn’t a massive game-changer in practise, but certainly additive to the usual mode and may help decrease input lag. Interestingly, I noted that frame-rates could drop a touch lower than 60fps – if I had to guess, I’d say that Guerrilla is tightening the dynamic resolution range here, and allowing VRR to do more heavy lifting below 60fps rather than lowering pixel counts. If true, it’s the sign of a nice rebalancing of image quality and performance, leaning into what VRR does best.
