Latest Horizon Forbidden West PC patch finally fixes its weirdest issue

Nestled within a seemingly ho-hum patch for Horizon Forbidden West’s PC edition is a change I’ve been crossing fingers and ritualistically sacrificing metal dinosaurs for since release. At last I can behold those glorious words: "Resolved performance regression when enabling Nvidia Reflex On+Boost." Finally!

Thus ends a truly baffling, and annoying, performance mishap that some players of the excellent open-world sequel may not even have known was afflicting it. In short, Nvidia Reflex – usually a helpful source of input lag reduction – was, with its On+Boost setting enabled, confusing GPUs into using less of their power than they possibly could. My previous performance testing found that simply switching Reflex to On, sans boost, could raise framerates by nearly 20%.

See? Annoying, and honestly quite strange. Reflex does interface with graphics cards, along with mice and monitors, but it doesn’t normally affect GPU utilisation and framerate performance either way. And now, it doesn’t in Forbidden West either. Which is nice.

If it sounds like I’m getting uppity over nothing, I suppose that in a cosmic sense I am. But it is quite exceptionally unusual for a feature that’s very often an instant enable to end up knackering game performance to such a degree. If your hardware supports it, the done thing with Nvidia Reflex is to whack it on On+Boost immediately – and why would you not? It’s free latency reduction with (typically) zero drawbacks. To see it go so wrong is just, eww, no.

Still, I’ve had a play around with the new update and it does indeed address the issue, so Reflex’s On+Boost mode can get back to making your mouse swishes feel slightly sharper. As always intended! The patch also includes fixes for some other lingering niggles, and makes some more in-game actions – like using the Navigation Assist feature of Aloy’s Focus – rebindable on mouse and keyboard.