The PC version of Horizon Forbidden West has been generally very well received, even if opinions of the original game are varied. That's because it's got the full gamut of upscalers on offer (DLSS, FSR, and XeSS), along with ultrawide monitor support, and even includes the use of DirectStorage. However, when it comes to frame generation, AMD's system was notable by its absence. In a chat with its senior director and principle programmers, Nixxes explained to me why it won't appear until a later patch—it's waiting for AMD to release the next update of FSR.
We were talking about performance enhancing tools and features and I asked the developers who ported Horizon Forbidden West, Nixxes Software, if there was a specific or technical reason as to why Nvidia's DLSS 3.5 Frame Generation was included but not AMD's FSR system.
"The short version is, we're sort of waiting for FSR 3.1," says Michiel Roza, the Principal Optimization Programmer at Nixxes. "Because we wanted the latest and greatest before integrating it."
AMD launched FSR 3, with a shader-based frame interpolation algorithm, back in September 2023, but since that time, the system hasn't received any notable updates. Or certainly none that fundamentally change or improve the quality of the algorithm. In contrast, Nvidia launched its DLSS 3 Frame Gen in September 2022, along with its Ada Lovelace GPUs, and it has tweaked the system a few times since then.
Jurjen Katsman, the Studio Head and Senior Director of Nixxes, also chipped in, saying: "We definitely see frame generation algorithms need more game specific tweaking, especially when it comes to UI, than some of the upscaler ones. So I think that's also a factor in there."
The user interface (UI) Katsman is referring to includes things like the inventory slots, health bar, and compass. In the vast majority of games, these elements are added after all of the rendering has been done—either immediately after post-processing or in a separate pass and then added before displaying. In its FSR 3 documentation, AMD points out that the UI needs special attention, otherwise it could end up looking garbled or out of sync with the rest of the game.
FSR 3.1 was announced last month at the annual Games Developer Conference (GDC), with improvements to the upscaler's quality being the most notable change, and AMD stated that it wouldn't be available for developers until the second quarter of the year. Given that we've only just reached that point, Nixxes has probably only just got it hands on the new software kit, so it'll be a while yet before we see a patch for Horizon Forbidden West sporting an option to use the improved FSR 3.1 Frame Generation.
