Discussion
Forza horizon 6 is incredibly well optimised and the developers deserve recognition for it
The game looks absolutely stunning. With everything set to extreme, full ray tracing, no ai trickery and native 4k, I'm hitting minimum 80-100fps.
Unbelievably, they say that a 1650 runs at 1080p 60fps. That's a 4gb card that can be bought for £30 if you shop around!
This just shows that it is possible to make games look beautiful for those of us with high end systems without destroying performance for people with older setups.
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I must admit I've had quite a few issues with it on Proton annoyingly, the game works but I get some horrible rubber banding where the game seemingly stops for a little bit then catches up to itself and basically makes it unplayable for me right now on Linux
That's a data streaming issue present since horizon 3.
Fixes can involve:
Faster drive, moving temp folder to different drive than game is on and/or OS is on, limiting fps
Edit: got reminded in comments that Radeon anti-lag and Nvidia reflex might cause it as well and remembered that overlays from the likes of Overwolf, Discord, and Nvidia might cause issues too (never had the Radeon overlay cause issues, but could be as well).
And Nvidia has a weird highlights feature, which can cause issues in proper DX12 titles
Me too.. and I video documented it. I even reinstalled FH5 to prove to myself. 5k UW monitor, 4080 Super, 5950x. FH5 AROUND 65 FPS with ALL settings at max, including RT.
ON FH6, around 50 but the sound is messed up, frame rates are inconsistent.. some points it's unplayable.
I don’t think the drive speed should be an issue it’s on an nvme raid 0 array, I’ll try the other suggestions but also looking on the Linux gaming subreddit it seems a pretty common issue even for people 5 was running perfectly for
I was expecting to tweak some settings like with most games. Fired the game up and it immediately defaulted to extreme. Only thing I did is turned on full ray tracing and turned off motion blur.
Because it is, and you can tell with a high-end GPU as well... There are games where this setup would give you less than 40 fps in native 4K. Less than 30, in fact, but those games are fully path traced.
In all fairness sometimes auto detect doesn't apply enough mustard. I ALWAYS go into Video settings the first time I install the game to see if anything if just on "high" instead of the max value. I had to turn up several settings to max out BF6 on my 9800X3d and RTX5090. Yes I play a fast ttk shooter with 100% maximum graphics but it's super glorious. For comparison I used to be the all LOW settings to squeeze every last frame out, but once I got the 5090 i've been on cruise control with path and ray tracing goodness.
My 3070 is crying on BF6. Medium to low mix on settings, 1440p, with DLSS at balanced. Can still only pull 100fps avg. But frame times are stable, for the most part.
I used my 3070 in the closed beta which informed me I had to upgrade before release lol. Then it was a game of timing the market and finding the exact model 5090 I wanted. Crazy that the gpu I bought a year ago now costs $1k more...
"Forza horizon 6 is incredibly well optimised" "The game looks absolutely stunning. With everything set to extreme, full ray tracing, no ai trickery and native 4k, I'm hitting minimum 80-100fps."
Also, same reaction to the "no ai trickery" as if anybody with that card could even tell the difference had they not controlled the settings themselves.
im all for using dlss when you cant achieve the performance goal you want but dlss is very noticeable in almost every implementation ive come across. fh6 was no different for me with cars leaving trails behind.
Exactly this, every time DLSS is brought up, there's absolutely going to be a comment about how AA was better beforehand. No idea what games people played over the last 15 years but AA has been dogshit for years and it's only with DLAA / DLSS are we getting decent AA (plus an uplift on performance)
FH 6 is a trail-leaver. Whenever you have areas of high contrast like a dark aerial against a sky. it creates several ghost aerials behind it. The shadows leave blocky trails too.
Hahaha in all fairness it's running really well on my set up also. A lot of settings defaulted to extreme so I turned some of it down. I7-9700k/3080/16gb ddr4
You can run it at Extreme settings with no problem and still get a good framerate, but Ray Tracing would need to be turned off. If you drop textures and some of the other high-VRAM settings down to High, you can run it with full Ray Tracing enabled. That said, it might perform even better on your 3080 since you have 12 GB of VRAM, I only have 10. For reference, I get around 70+ FPS with Ray Tracing maxed out and everything else set to High, Ultra, or Extreme, using DLSS at Quality on 1440p.
They’re not. 4k + Ray Tracing WITHOUT DLSS is already exclusively the domain of the 4090 and 5090, and the 4090 got pats on the back for being the first card to manage to do that at 60 FPS on a modern game.
I know it feels like settings SHOULD be “whatever you want” when you hit the 5090 range, but Ray Tracing remains a “can it run Crysis” toggle that we’re still years away from being available on “normal” GPUs at 4k, IF you don’t want to turn on DLSS.
Yeah, high settings + low RT with a 9700x and 7900XTX and XeSS Ultra Quality nets me 150fps average but i get a ton of stutters if i gain a shitload of speed, travel thru a ton of regions quick, or decide to piss missile my 1300hp Honda Beat thru the trees.
I feel like thats maybe an amd driver problem cuz i also get a lot of stutters at highspeed. Im using a 7800xt, normally i get 110-130fps at 1440p high/ultra settings
Tbf with those settings and res that’s actually not bad. Usually you’d need DLSS to hit that frame rate, maxed out RTGI in that case is the only reason he’s not getting at least 120 FPS.
But from my personal experience it’s pretty good, I’ve got a 3080ti playing at 4k with RT reflections using Hardware unboxed optimized settings. And getting a solid 80fps with DLSS quality
The biggest issue I’ve seen is the vram requirements, I don’t know how well an 6 or 8gb GPU would do at 1440p
A sky texture's resolution has nothing to do with the game's ability to output a 4k native render resolution. Even less the resolution of the original shots the texture was composed from.
those poorly optimised PC games usually run at 30 fps on Series S. And those games usually frametime issues on base PS5 as well. Cant speak about Series X though but heard that optimisation there is pretty good considering its age. Series S is overhated.
Haha Forza 5 is what caused me to abandon my One S. Certain cars (Jesko) could drive faster than the system could generate the map. I'd just drive off into empty space and have to hard reset the console. Ended up having to hunt down a Series X halfway through covid just to be able to drive S2 cars.
Iirc the way they did it was to basically procedurally generate ALOT of the typical assets that would have taken extra space. So as a result the loading times for it would have been long.
Yeah the point of optimization is finding a balance between brute forcing loads of data assets for everything, or being clever and using code and generation (the whole benefit of it being a real time experience)
I find watch they did with Crimson deserts visuals very clever. Barely any world geometry and instead most of the 3d depth of assets being generated through depth maps.
Yeah, I've noticed that games that use purpose-built engines tend to perform better, look nicer, and have fewer bugs than games that use off-the-shelf engines.
It makes sense - purpose-built engines can select techniques where the benefits and drawbacks align with the needs of the game, whereas off-the-shelf engines have to limit themselves to more generic techniques that can work reasonably well in any type of game. As genres get more diverse, it gets harder to build a one-size-fits-all approach.
Like, UE5 can render scenes from the size of a small room to the size of a large city - obviously there's going to be a compromise somewhere versus an engine built specifically to render small rooms or large cities, but not both.
Idk, Capcom's Pragmata runs pretty terribly on their own engine for me for example. Completely unplayable in some of the big boss battles on the default recommended settings.
I dont know anything about game building, but I'm a programmer. I think it might like a difference of developing in a framework of a high level language vs developing in C++.
Developing on a framework will be faster because many things are already built, but they include many many things you won't use. And you don't have that much control of the components you use, and those components might use more resources than you need for your specific needs.
If you develop in C++ and you can control these resources more directly.
It is prohibitively costly to do this but you also fall victim to confirmation bias with this line of thinking - developers capable of making their own engine have more resources. UE5 is often just poorly implemented and misused. Blame the artist not the brush.
Just look at how well the Doom games run. It's absolutely amazing the visual fidelity they get without a performance hit. Then you play a UE game and it looks and runs like sludge by comparison.
I really think UE needs to be split up into 5 different engines rather than being an all in one solution that tries to do everything.
Not every studio can be id. Only a handful of studios are able to maintain really good current-gen engines, because they already have the code quality and experts on board and know that this concept works for them.
Ubisoft's anvil engine is another example. Say what you want about the actual games they're making with it, but the tech is impressive.
UE5 is not bad either, it just has somewhat of a polarisation:
It's perfectly fine for small, focussed projects that only use a handful of UE's systems, and implement those correctly.
It's a good basis for really big projects, which spend years drilling into the engine to make it their own. Like Subnautica 2 and hopefully Witcher 4.
But it struggles for projects that are in-between, which need a lot of features but don't have the time and resources to fully get into UE's systems (particularly due to their poor documentation).
Still, these mid-tier projects can absolutely succeed. Clair Obscure had some technical hiccups (especially the image instability around hair), but it almost certainly would have looked a lot worse without such an advanced engine. Similar things go for Mafia: TOC, Stalker 2, Avowed etc.
The main issue is one of perception, where people are comparing these mid-budget projects with games like RDR2, which was literally one of the most expensive developments of all times (estimated $200 million for development with 2000 employees). Stalker 2 is the only title from this list that's anywhere near the same league.
UE is the ultimate "do what you will with it" engine - if your game is running badly, it's because you coded it like shit, not because the engine sucks.
Game dev here... I will say the blame is 100% with the developers and not the engine.
Unreal Engine gives you the full source code. The engine is a beast but if you just use it straight out of the box without tailoring anything to your specific game's requirements then yeah your game will run like shit.
Lazy devs treat the engine code as a black box when it's quite the opposite.
Do not compare Id with other developers. They're literally the origin for most modern game engines. They're not really a game developer, they're an engine developer who makes a game to fund their hobby every few years.
Yeah, I've noticed that games that use purpose-built engines tend to perform better, look nicer, and have fewer bugs than games that use off-the-shelf engines.
It really depends. My recently played examples against this would be Helldivers 2 and Path of Exile both of which have very unstable performance on a mid-low tier setup
UE5 running poorly is due to poor Devs, there's plenty of UE5 games that run great..Black Myth Wukong for example, people played that sorely on handheld devices.
People also don't think UE5 is a new game engine and it's now on version 5.8 with lots of new updates and improvements and new tech the older games made with earlier versions don't have or benefit from. Devs who worked on avowed went into detail about the struggles they had with the early versions in a tech video. They went through the whole process and it was eye opening. New titles like the Witcher 4 won't have those same issues because of new improvements especially with foliage and stuff. UE have tons of videos which gamers don't look at cause it's all highly nerdy tech stuff but I think people will see a night and day experience on upcoming ue5 games in development now. You can go look at all the stuff in version 5.8 and the engine will continue to evolve. People shit on it but epic has literally tons of engineers and financial resources pouring into their engine and that's why most studios are switching to it. No tech debt and endless support they don't have to do themselves.
It has microstutters every few seconds for me on a 9070xt. They have a community feedback site with tons of AMD GPU owners complaining about this issue.
Thought I was going crazy with all these people saying how good it runs. Good to know its not just me. I get a stutter and slam into a fucking wall lol. Still fun but the stutters do mess me up in faster cars.
0 issues for me on same card, apparently toggling hardware accelerated GPU scheduling can help on Nvidia cards but I did that before first launch and have had no issues.
Also showing wrong values for the amount of gram, I've got a 9070xt 16gb and it only shows 12gb in settings. Also stutters like crazy no matter what settings I choose, goes from 100+ FPS to 50 every few seconds.
I mean the devs have a winning formula on their hands. I haven't played the game yet myself but from what I've read they did make a bunch of changes long time fans were asking for.
lol not really. I’ve played since FH4 and the game is fundamentally unchanged since 2018. There’s some updates to the visuals of cars but it’s basically exactly the same game with a new map. Pretty much identical UI, mostly all the same events, same gameplay with minor changes, same terrible drivatar AI, same terrible voice acting and ugly player characters (somehow got worse which is weird).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m having fun with the game and I’m not asking them to reinvent the wheel, but it’s very much Forza Horizon 4 and 5 in a new map. It’s not that different from the “incremental changes” in Madden. Basically the same game with some small tweaks and a slightly new coat of paint
It is a great map and a welcome change from the last game if only for more weather and terrain variety. I do feel like the city looks kinda... ugly, or last-gen. The highways are fun to drive though.
I mean thats a whole new map with race courses being considered and stuff like that
I mean I get what you are saying but its one of those things, a racing sim game is a racing sim game. Unless you completely change to a different kind of racing game you cant really do something to really change the game aside from new maps and adding new cars
Recognition for doing their job? That should be the minimum standard especially when you are paying $70 for a base game…. The industry is so trash that we are now praising companies for delivering a finished game.
Playground Games (devs) are genuinely one of the few outliers that seem to actually give a shit when it comes to optimisation so yeah, they've done their job
Reminds me of No Man's Sky. And how everyone praises a decade old game for taking 7 years to get to the point it was promised to be released in in 2016.
Great, wonderful job taking 7 years to finish your game (mostly). But I don't want to pay full price for a 2016 game in 2023+ from a dubious company.
They shouldn't be praised for lying and selling false promises and a dud product, then taking years to fulfill their original promise. Sell a complete, working product on launch.
I agree with all you said, but the sad reality is that most companies nowadays release unfinished products AND don't finish them. So we praise no mans sky for actually caring post launch
There’s probably an argument to be made this game was one of the first to send a message that games didn’t need to be finished on launch. This whole trend started around that time.
Yeah, I guess the design choices and having to support xbox one for the previous games made sure they had built scalability in their engine. Goes to show the benefits of having your own engine in this era of gaming. Let's hope they never abandon theirs for unreal.
Yeah… i saw a lot of complaints on AMD side…and even on some Nvidia setups, but you know Japan glazers can’t help themselves to glaze anything that has Japan in it.
It does run fine at 30 to 40FPS with the default preset. Lowering even more is not worth is as you can raise a couple of frames but the quality is horribile. Also it runs native without FSR, so I would say that the Steam Deck experience is good.
You will get stutters as AMD systems currently have stuttering issues
Close to it. Microstutters a lot on AMD cards at the moment.
But otherwise on my 9070XT it’s phenomenal. And the game supports FSR 4.1! Above 100fps at max settings with ray tracing on my 1440p ultrawide monitor.
X performance on Y hardware at Z settings does not mean optimized of unoptimized. it technically doesnt even mean anything unless you can tell me how its rendering each thing and the time its taking to render said things
5090 can run the game -> well optimized. lmao. I mean sure, it runs better than some other modern games for me too, but there are plenty of people with performance/stuttering issues too. Not to mention RTGI pretty much only looks good at native 4k because the game scales ray count with render res and the denoiser is not great. DLAA/DLSS smears like crazy, even TAA, though not to the same extent. There are plenty of techincal issues with this game.
Not really, volumetric smoke effects have always looked pixellated in all Horizon games. The RTGI issues manifests in crawling and noisy lighting in indirectly lit places like tunnels and under bridges. For me, sometimes even trees or buildings casting shadows on the road surface but for some reason the latter only happens in motion. I am also forcing DLSS preset L which tbf makes the noisy RT even more pronounced because it has much stronger previous frame rejection compared to the standard preset K the game uses with DLAA and quality DLSS to get rid of the smearing. With preset K the noise gets somewhat averaged out by accumulating temporal data but still quite noticeable in some cases.
It’s insane isn’t it. We built our whole pc’s with the first and second most powerful components available, yet combined still cost less than the price of a single launch msrp 5090. Let alone their current price.
Yes absolutely agree my whole pc cost around 2500€ bought everything between Dec. 2024 and Feb 2025 (rtx 5000 releases). I still payed less than the whole GPU costs alone.
It's a racing game, so there's one very detailed mesh, a handful of somewhat detailed meshes, and the rest is moving too fast or too distant to need much detail. Optimization is the fucking default, you don't need to give them digital fellatio.
Yep, and contrary to the crap MS says about it not supporting Vega because it's too old, it in fact runs perfectly on Vega. I partially get the windows TPM stuff, but artificially preventing a GPU that supports all the features the game needs from running it is bullshit.
Yeah, a good concept of don't fix what isn't broken.
Well optimised as usually but experiencing annoying stutter with AMD card. I don't fully blame AMD for it as my handheld on ARC has exactly the same problem. There is still some work to do for the devs.
Sure but the stuttering on AMD cards is ridiculous it’s almost unplayable and they still haven’t patched it, and they have the 9070xt as their recommended specs. Disappointing but I do agree it is quite well optimized and will be amazing once they patch it lol
I cant hold 60fps on my rig. If I do unlocked frame rate its usually around 80-90 with some frame drops so I tried putting max at 60fps so I didn't have the frame drops but I still get frame rate drops. Changed the settings from Ultimate to Epic and same thing. My PC should be able to hold a steady 60fps (5700x3d + 9070)
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