Forza Motorsport PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Conclusion – A sub-par PC version from Microsoft

Conclusion – A solid racer with a less than solid PC version

Forza Motorsport is clearly a game that was designed for Xbox first and PC second. This game has a lot of design decisions that would be questionable for any PC title. Its 60 FPS framerate cap for online races feels unnecessary, and tweaking this game’s graphical options can be a chore at best and a nightmare at worst. Between performance degradations and visual bugs, we found ourselves rebooting the game every time we tweaked a graphical setting. This made testing difficult, and makes for a terrible gameplay experience for players.

Unlike most PC games, Forza Motorsport’s performance scales poorly with resolution. This makes the performance benefits of technologies like AMD’s FSR 2 and Nvidia’s DLSS upscalers limited in scope. In fact, setting DLSS to quality mode resulted in reduced performance with our RTX 3070 Ti, which is downright strange behaviour. This trait makes Forza Motorsport’s PC very demanding at 1080p, which is bad news for owners of lower-end graphics cards.

Performance Tips

For gamers who want to boost this game’s performance, your best option is to simply disable ray tracing. In Forza Motorsport, ray tracing places a lot of strain on CPU and GPU hardware, and turning it off can result in huge performance gains. On our RTX 3070 Ti, turning off ray tracing resulted in a 89% performance increase.

If you have disabled ray tracing and still require higher framerates, lowering settings like cubemap reflections, particles, and shadows can have a notable performance impact. With 1080p high settings with ray tracing disabled, GPUs like AMD’s RX 6600 XT can achieve a steady 60 FPS framerate. For lower-end GPU users, you will need to use upscaling or lower graphical settings to run Forza Motorsport at 60+ FPS framerates.

The PC version of Forza Motorsport can be best described with one word “disappointing”. With Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5, PC gamers have been blessed with solid PC versions, and it is obvious that Forza Motorsport was created by a different team. I wish that Forza Motorsport had a PC version that was on par with Playground Games’ recent efforts. Forza Motorsport reminds me of the UWP days of Microsoft’s Xbox/PC releases, and while this PC version is serviceable, it is not good.

Closing thoughts

Forza Motorsport is a solid racing game, but its PC version leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps future updates will make this game’s PC version better, but for now Forza Motorsport does not deliver the quality that we expect from a AAA PC release from Microsoft. We expect better from Microsoft, and Playground Games has taught us that we can expect better from Forza. When it comes to PC, Turn 10 can learn a lot from Playground Games.

You can join the discussion on Forza Motorsport’s PC version on the OC3D Forums.