[regarding Horizon Zero Dawn]
kmanitou: If they ever fix the PC version, maybe I'll find out.
Orkhepaj: whats wrong with the pc version?
There's one interesting issue that I heard about.
Apparently, the internal asset creation tools for this game allowed each object to have its own shader program. On consoles, this isn't an issue because the shaders can just be compiled, ahead of time, for the specific GPU in the console (and said precompiled shaders would be distributed with the rest of the game).
On PCs, however, it doesn't work that way. Since there are a lot of different GPUs out there, shaders have to be compiled for each machine individually, so the game has to ship the source code (or some intermediate form like SPIR-V), and then the game must compile all these shaders before the game can run. I've read reports of the game taking as much as a half hour to start the first time.
(A shader is a piece of code that runs on the GPU rather than the CPU, typically as part of a rendering pipeline (though these days compute shaders exist).)
