A player gets most irritated when his or her PC lags while playing a game. And especially while playing an action-packed RPG game such as Horizon Zero Dawn. Due to the high graphics and PC specifications required, many gamers are facing lagging issues. If you are one of them, here are a few troubleshooting ways to fix Horizon Zero Dawn PC lagging issues.
Horizon Zero Dawn: How to Fix PC Lagging Issues
Lagging issues can be fixed only if your system meets all the recommended specifications for the game. Following troubleshoots can help you fix Horizon Zero Dawn PC lagging issues.
Free-up resources
The first and simplest Horizon Zero Dawn PC lag fix is to free up CPU resources. Every app running in the background consumes CPU resources, which might slow down your PC. To optimize CPU performance for Horizon Zero Dawn, close all the background applications and set the game on high priority via task manager. Follow these steps to free-up resources:
- Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to open the task manager
- Click all the applications except for Steam and Horizon and choose end task to close them
- Head back to the task manage
- Go to the “details” tab
- Right-click on Horizon Zero Dawn.exe and set the priority as high
These steps will clear all background applications and free-up CPU space for the game preventing any lag.
Update drivers
Graphics cards are one of the culprits that can cause lagging in almost every game and not just Horizon Zero Dawn. Most of the gamers would already know whether their PC has an NVIDIA driver or AMD driver. But if you don’t know you can check your graphic card by following these steps:
- Click Ctrl+Alt+Del to go to the task manager
- Go to the “performance” tab
- Select GPU from the list on the left and check the name of the graphic card
Once you know the name of the graphic card in your PC, you should check for any available updates. Drivers are updated occasionally to prevent any security and performance issues. You can visit AMD and NVIDIA’s official website to find out the latest drivers. You can select the lastest drivers and install them on your PC. This will eliminate almost all the lagging issues caused due to the high graphic requirements.
Clear temporary files memory
The next Horizon Zero Dawn PC lag fix is to clear temporary files memory from your PC. These files are of no use, but if not cleared, they can take up a considerable amount of RAM space and slow down your PC. Follow these guidelines to clear temporary memory space:
- Press Win+R to open the run box
- Type “prefetch” in the dialog box
- Remove all the junk files that can be deleted
- Now again press Win+R
- Type “%temp%” in the dialog box
- Remove all the junk files that are deletable
There you go, all the temporary files that were consuming valuable space in your PC are now gone.
Run the game in full-screen mode
If you are playing the game in windowed mode, you should consider changing it to fullscreen mode. While playing in windowed mode, you may experience stuttering lag spikes. These lag spikes are reduced when you play the game in fullscreen mode. You can visit the settings in the game to change the view mode.
Adjust in-game settings
You can reduce the graphics of the game to prevent lag. But this might make your gaming experience poor. Hence, we recommend taking this step only if none of the above steps are fixing lagging issues. To reduce in-game graphics, you can:
- Head to the settings menu in the game
- Reduce all the graphics settings
- To determine which setting is causing the lag, increase graphics of one setting and return to the game
- Keep on doing this until you find the culprit
These fixes for Horizon Zero Dawn PC lagging issues will improve your gaming experience. To further enhance your experience, you might want to upgrade spear to take down enemies much quickly. You would also be interested to know how long will it take to beat Horizon Zero Dawn in PC?
