Forza Horizon 4 PC Performance Review

Core Scaling – Is Forza Horizon 4 as CPU limited as its predecessor?

Forza Horizon 3 released with a severe CPU performance limit, making a steady 60+ FPS framerate difficult to achieve in demanding scenes, where large numbers of vehicles are present or in other built-up areas. While this was addressed later in a post-launch patch, thanks to the addition of increased multi-threading to the game’s engine, we are still left wondering how CPU performance will stack up in its sequel. 

To put it simply, Forza Horizon 4 is easy to run at 60+ FPS on modern processors, with the game being able to take advantage of more than four cores. If anything, Forza Horizon 4 is showcasing that the death of the quad-core PC gaming era is coming and that the era of high-core count PC gaming is about to get started.  

Using our dual-core, quad-thread system configuration, we found that Forza Horizon’s performance levels dipped significantly, with the game becoming full CPU limited, presenting plenty of micro stutters and dips below 60FPS at 1080p when using an RX Vega 56 at Ultra settings. Moving to a fully-fledged quad core is enough to keep Forza Horizon 4 above 60FPS, but that doesn’t mean that the game is fully GPU limited, with Forza Horizon requiring a quad-core processor with Hyperthreading/SMT to become GPU limited. 

If we move to more powerful GPU hardware, we can see Forza Horizon 4 become CPU limited once again, but at that stage, the game is already running at 100+ FPS at all times.