1) Shaders don't seem to be cached? Stutters when approaching each type of enemy for the first time during a game session and when crossing an invisible barrier to another "zone" (usually zone boundaries are defined by rivers/streams).

2) Cutscene before the Main Menu is unskippable and will play again during subsequent launches of the game if you don't create a Save/never began gameplay. This cutscene also stuttered at the same points every time I watched it (no other cutscene in the game stutters).

4) On PC any object influenced by physics likes to freak out during camera angle changes in cutscenes.

5) Compass UI renders at 30FPS while everything else is 60FPS. As a result, the Compass gets very blurry during camera adjustments.

6) Bugged fire movement for Fire breather Carja in Meridian. Also applies to water ripples when swimming in any water in the game.

7) While "The Cut" expansion pack content's snow deformation is fixed for most areas of The Cut, there are still some places where it is bugged.

8) The game crashed twice during my 88.2 hour playthrough. The first time it crashed the Windows Exception Handler was triggered, the 2nd time the games own Exception Handler was triggered. The 2nd crash was when I decided after 30 hours of playing to test out Fullscreen "Exclusive" mode, the game crashed within 10 minutes of changing to that display mode so I reverted back to Borderless Fullscreen.

Ryzen 3700X
Geforce 1070Ti
32GB RAM
Windows 10, 22H2
Game installed to WD Black HDD

After 88 hours of playing the game, I'd rate the port as an "A Minus". The stutters have a huge impact on my enjoyment of this port.

1) Patch 1.11 improved the shader compilation and caching. It's supposed to build the required shaders during the loading screens, but optional shaders will be compiled in the background as needed. So I suppose the stutter could still be shader-related, or it could simply be texture streaming or something else.

Are you using an SSD for your OS and the game files?

2) If you try to quit, you can cancel out of the cutscene to skip it.
Might even work with Alt-F4....

Originally posted by cswiger:

1) Patch 1.11 improved the shader compilation and caching. It's supposed to build the required shaders during the loading screens, but optional shaders will be compiled in the background as needed. So I suppose the stutter could still be shader-related, or it could simply be texture streaming or something else.

Are you using an SSD for your OS and the game files?

2) If you try to quit, you can cancel out of the cutscene to skip it.
Might even work with Alt-F4....

1) Windows is on an SSD, the game is on a WD Black HDD.
2) I tried escape, spacebar, all face buttons and the Start button and the cutscene could not be skipped. Maybe it becomes skippable once Shaders finish compiling during it?

I would've thought the devs would sensibly cache the Shaders after compiling them so that the stutters don't re-occur during subsequent launches of the game. Maybe you're right, maybe the stutters I notice during that cutscene are to do with a sudden need to load a huge amount of textures as it coincides with a camera angle change.

I left the game on the main menu for an hour or so last night with the intent of letting it compile the Shaders before I'd actually play the game today. I waited until CPU activity had more or less stabilized before quitting the game last night.

I've got a Geforce 1070Ti and Ryzen 3700X with 32GB RAM.

The introductory scene with Rost will not play once you iniitate a new game and hit a save point.

Even a 7200 RPM HDD will at best hit 150 MB/second transfer rate just due to the speed of the platters. A SATA3 SSD can hit the maximum bus speed of ~500 MB/second, which is worth considering when it comes to this game.

Originally posted by Nicholas Steel:

1) Windows is on an SSD, the game is on a WD Black HDD.
2) I tried escape, spacebar, all face buttons and the Start button and the cutscene could not be skipped. Maybe it becomes skippable once Shaders finish compiling during it?

I would've thought the devs would sensibly cache the Shaders after compiling them so that the stutters don't re-occur during subsequent launches of the game.

I left the game on the main menu for an hour or so last night with the intent of letting it compile the Shaders before I'd actually play the game today. I waited until CPU activity had more or less stabilized before quitting the game last night.

I've got a Geforce 1070Ti and Ryzen 3700X with 32GB RAM.

alt+f4 is how you skip the opening cutscene.

Click no on the box that pops up. Cutscene skipped. No idea why it works that way for the opening with baby aloy, but, that's how it works.

The intro scene with baby aloy is prerendered so it will always be 30 fps

Originally posted by life is dank:

The intro scene with baby aloy is prerendered so it will always be 30 fps

Yeah I realize the pre-rendered scenes will always be 30FPS.

Originally posted by Nicholas Steel:

I would've thought the devs would sensibly cache the Shaders after compiling them so that the stutters don't re-occur during subsequent launches of the game. Maybe you're right, maybe the stutters I notice during that cutscene are to do with a sudden need to load a huge amount of textures as it coincides with a camera angle change.

They tried to do that at launch, but for various reasons people kept screwing up the shader compilation process. Usually it was due to folks running other programs in parallel with HZD, such as streaming apps, and they'd alt-tab out to chat with fans or do something else while the looong compilation process (which wasn't called such back then during the loading screen) would run. However, this would cause an issue with the resulting shader cache files.
The game would complete the process on that first run, and load into the game and be playable. But for some reason the files would actually end up being corrupted and so on subsequent runs, the game would see the files and think they are not completed. And try to redo them... but not be able to actually go through with the process because the files were actually completed. So the game would hang on the compilation process.

The solution was to either delete the shader cache manually or (if available) update drivers to force the game to completely restart the process over.

This whole issue eventually got solved by making the game just toss out the previously-created shaders and rebuild them anew on every run.

I had some weird sky box problem but it quickly disappeared on it's own, this was also after like 230mins of non-stop gameplay and much chunked ram

Originally posted by Superi0rJake:

I had some weird sky box problem but it quickly disappeared on it's own, this was also after like 230mins of non-stop gameplay and much chunked ram

I've experienced:

A particular pool of water being brighter than it should be (not affected by shadows/light obstruction).

A particular large rock having shadows glitch out across its whole surface every other frame.

Rain droplets causing odd visuals when impacting the skin of an NPC.

I've noticed some fairly aggressive texture pop-in on occasion, and some shadows at night-time can look a bit strange.

"The Cut" expansion pack content

I thought they fixed the snow deformation when walking around, jumping and attacking... looks like they didn't (game is running at 50FPS):

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/778887485400154132/1094157580013674566/Desktop_2023.04.08_-_17.08.06.02_H.264.mp4

Originally posted by Nicholas Steel:

"The Cut" expansion pack content

I thought they fixed the snow deformation when walking around, jumping and attacking... looks like they didn't (game is running at 50FPS):

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/778887485400154132/1094157580013674566/Desktop_2023.04.08_-_17.08.06.02_H.264.mp4

Hard to tell. I mean, to me it looks fine, but IDK what exactly is bothering you about the snow.

Originally posted by Nicholas Steel:

Originally posted by cswiger:

1) Patch 1.11 improved the shader compilation and caching. It's supposed to build the required shaders during the loading screens, but optional shaders will be compiled in the background as needed. So I suppose the stutter could still be shader-related, or it could simply be texture streaming or something else.

Are you using an SSD for your OS and the game files?

2) If you try to quit, you can cancel out of the cutscene to skip it.
Might even work with Alt-F4....

1) Windows is on an SSD, the game is on a WD Black HDD.
2) I tried escape, spacebar, all face buttons and the Start button and the cutscene could not be skipped. Maybe it becomes skippable once Shaders finish compiling during it?

I would've thought the devs would sensibly cache the Shaders after compiling them so that the stutters don't re-occur during subsequent launches of the game. Maybe you're right, maybe the stutters I notice during that cutscene are to do with a sudden need to load a huge amount of textures as it coincides with a camera angle change.

I left the game on the main menu for an hour or so last night with the intent of letting it compile the Shaders before I'd actually play the game today. I waited until CPU activity had more or less stabilized before quitting the game last night.

I've got a Geforce 1070Ti and Ryzen 3700X with 32GB RAM.

>gaming on an HDD
ISHYGDDT

Originally posted by Eye of Newt:

Originally posted by Nicholas Steel:

"The Cut" expansion pack content

I thought they fixed the snow deformation when walking around, jumping and attacking... looks like they didn't (game is running at 50FPS):

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/778887485400154132/1094157580013674566/Desktop_2023.04.08_-_17.08.06.02_H.264.mp4

Hard to tell. I mean, to me it looks fine, but IDK what exactly is bothering you about the snow.

On PS4 the snow consistently deforms to show every footstep and would also part around you as you walk/attack through thick snow. On PC it is inconsistently occurring/often looks like you're no-clipping through the snow.

Originally posted by Chuck Sneedly:

Originally posted by Nicholas Steel:

1) Windows is on an SSD, the game is on a WD Black HDD.
2) I tried escape, spacebar, all face buttons and the Start button and the cutscene could not be skipped. Maybe it becomes skippable once Shaders finish compiling during it?

I would've thought the devs would sensibly cache the Shaders after compiling them so that the stutters don't re-occur during subsequent launches of the game. Maybe you're right, maybe the stutters I notice during that cutscene are to do with a sudden need to load a huge amount of textures as it coincides with a camera angle change.

I left the game on the main menu for an hour or so last night with the intent of letting it compile the Shaders before I'd actually play the game today. I waited until CPU activity had more or less stabilized before quitting the game last night.

I've got a Geforce 1070Ti and Ryzen 3700X with 32GB RAM.

>gaming on an HDD
ISHYGDDT

It's not so bad, load your save file and then quit to desktop and load your save file again and you'll notice it takes less than half the time the 2nd time around to finish loading in to gameplay.

Why? After your first loading of your Save File most of the frequently used game data will be cached in to RAM by Windows and then that portion of data will be read from RAM as the game dynamically needs it as you run around in the world (until it gets evicted from the RAM cache than it'll have to read it from the HDD).

It's like taking advantage of a dynamic RAM Drive. The more excessive amount of RAM you have installed in your system, the better this feature of Windows can work to offset the performance downside of a HDD.