Forza Horizon 4 PC Demo Performance Impressions

Conclusion

As much as we would like to take a deeper dive into Forza Horizon 4’s demo version, it is hard to see the point of it when we know that “optimised” drivers will be coming for the game’s final release and that the finished game will be released relatively soon. Beyond that, our readers should already know that we have been busy working on Nvidia’s Turing graphics cards, which has caused us to delay our Shadow of the Tomb Raider performance review.  
  
Aside from a few nitpicks, it is hard to complain about what Playground Games offers here, with Forza Horizon 4’s demo offering stable performance on modern graphics hardware while providing PC gamers much better CPU/core scaling than its immediate predecessor. 

Perhaps the only major issue with the game was its performance on our ageing GTX 960 and R9 380 graphics cards, both of which offer 2GB of VRAM. To achieve 30+ FPS framerates on these graphics cards, we needed to use Forza Horizon 4’s Medium and Low presets respectively for our GTX 960 and R9 380 graphics cards respectively, acting a clear sign that the era of 2GB graphics cards is coming to a close.  

In Forza Horizon 4, we recommend that PC gamers use a graphics card with 3GB of VRAM, as this will ensure that you don’t run into many major VRAM related issues. For Ultra settings, we used 4GB of VRAM at 1080p, with the game’s High preset requiring around 3GB at the same resolution.

Unlike some older UWP titles on the Windows 10/Microsoft Store, Forza Horizon 4 can be played without VSYNC enabled and with an unlocked framerate, making 120Hz gameplay possible in systems with enough graphical horsepower. The game runs in a Fullscreen Windowed mode, which may not be to the taste of all PC gamers, but the benefits of this design decision is that it facilitates fast alt-tab action. Sadly, Playground games have no control over this thanks to how UWP works, which means that PC gamers will have to live with Fullscreen Windowed mode in Forza Horizon 4, unless you can somehow convince Microsoft to release Forza games on Steam. 

Performance-wise, Forza Horizon 4 runs well on all of our modern graphics hardware, offering 1080p 60+ FPS framerates on the RX 580 Strix and GTX 1060 Strix while achieving the same feat at 1440p using the game’s High preset. Even at 4K our GTX 1060 and RTX 580 Strix graphics cards were able to produce stable 30+ FPS framerates at Ultra settings, the same resolution/framerate target as the Xbox One X.  

CPU-wise we found no obvious causes for concern, with the Forza engine proving to he highly multi-threaded, allowing us to achieve 100+ FPS framerates on our RX Vega 56 at 1080p. At launch, Forza Horizon 3 has difficulty attaining 60FPS framerates on PC, revealing some major changes to since the Forza Horizon’s last iteration. 

One oddity that is worth noting is that Forza Horizon 4 offers fantastic performance levels on AMD’s RX Vega 56, surpassing Nvidia’s GTX 1080 in all of our tests, an unusual feat given the RX 580’s level performance with Nvidia’s GTX 1060. These performance levels showcase how beneficial some of AMD’s architectural improvements with Vega can be in specific use cases, though it is worth noting that these kinds of performance gains are not seen in most PC games, especially when it comes to older titles. 

The only gameplay impacting bug that we found in Forza Horizon 4’s demo is a strange issue where the map refused to load for s time while racing, causing the Forza 4 to pause while the game frantically tried to stream in everything at once. This only happened to us a few times during gameplay, and the bug will likely be addressed before the full game officially launches. If you want to see this bug in action, you can have a look at this video from ABSRD FILMS on YouTube. 

If you want to see how Forza Horizon 4 performs for yourself, you can download the game’s 30GB demo on the Microsoft Store. This demo is available for free to all Windows 10 users. 

You can join the discussion on Forza Horizon 4’s PC demo performance on the OC3D Forums.