Forza Horizon 4 will have a 60FPS mode on Xbox One X – Great news for PC gamers

Many PC gamers will remember Forza Horizon 3’s release on PC, the first Forza game to ever hit the PC platform. At launch, a lot of PC gamers were unable to run at a steady 60FPS framerate in demanding areas of the game, thanks to heavy single-threaded CPU utilisation on the platform.   

This issue stems from Forza Horizon 3’s 30FPS framerate target/cap on Xbox One, as well as a few other factors, which can be somewhat summarised by the fact that this was Playground game’s first PC release of Forza, leaving them unaware of gamer’s expectations for the platform. 

With the reveal of Forza Horizon 4 at E3 2018, Playground revealed that the game would support a 60FPS mode on Xbox One X, delivering the first 60FPS entry of the Horizon series on consoles, with standard Xbox One and S owners with a 30 FPS target. This disparity between Xbox One consoles likely stems from raw CPU power, with Xbox One offering processor clock speeds of 1.75GHz while the Xbox One X offers clock speeds of 2.3GHz, a boost of almost 31.5% on X-series hardware. The Xbox One’s lack of CPU grunt is likely what is keeping the console at a 30FPS framerate target. 

Support for 60FPS framerates on consoles is excellent news for PC users, as this means that Forza Horizon 4 has been designed to run at 60FPS from the outset, which should allow PC users to utilise their processors better and achieve higher framerates than even the Xbox One X. While most PC gamers will run the game with an unlocked framerate, the optimisation required to get the game at 60FPS on Xbox One X will likely translate to better CPU performance on PC.