Horizon Zero Dawn quirky game play

[sempterobit]

It may be old news, but I thought I would share a fix for a screen freeze problem I used to get every time I try to run Horizon Zero Dawn. Apparently it s a common problem with this game. I start game in Steam. Before I continue game play I go to game settings. (This is every time I run game). I go to display settings, and change to Windowed mode. I click apply. I then immediately change to Borderless (window) mode, and also apply setting. (I have only been able to play game in borderless window mode). I do not make any other settings changes. If I do not do this every time I play game the screen will freeze within 5 to 30 seconds into game play, and it actually requires a hard reboot. Also concerning this game, to quit, I need to stop it through Steam; not through the game. If I exit through the game that also crashes system, and requires a hard reboot to get out of it. I run game on a 4k 65" OLED TV @3840 x 2160 resolution. GPU is a RTX 3070. Upscaled method is FidelityFX Super Resolution and Upscale Quality is Balanced. I have 147 hours on game so far…

[Gamall]

If all else fails, you may want to downgrade drivers.

The problems I had with HZD began with nvidia 515.48.07; those were DLSS-specific problems (black third of the screen after displaying map).

Updated nVidia - something is not right

After upgrading to 515.48 I had a weird bug in Horizon Zero Dawn, which has otherwise been rock-solid on my 3070: opening the map and going back to the game resulted in the right third of the screen being black with some oily rainbow effects. I downgraded with eos-shifttime and everything is fine for now. edit: if I can’t wait until the next nvidia version to upgrade my system, I’ll try and see whether the LTS kernel makes any difference.

It got worse at some point after that, and, having played again recently, I have experienced consistent crashes, usually shortly after entering gameplay, as you describe. They are fairly easy to provoke by changing upscaling method repeatedly. I observed them with a 3070 and a 4070.

Most of my playtime was with 3070+515.43.04, and it was flawless.

@sempterobit

requires a hard reboot.

I hope you don’t mean “shut the whole computer down with the off button”; there are less drastic options that work for this, such as, by order of ascending severity, CTRL+ALT+ESC+click on window in KDE, CTRL+ALT+Fx + top + kill -9, CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE (if activated; kills whole desktop), REISUB (if activated), etc.

[Gamall]

As of today, I can’t reproduce any of the problems I had with HZD, whether crashes or DLSS weirdness with the map.

That’s from a few minutes of intense testing, changing display options etc, not genuine gameplay, mind.