All Bark No Bite
After a long wait, the new installment of Forza Motorsport is finally on the horizon. With promises of enhanced AI, dynamic weather, and a new renderer, fans have high expectations for this racing game, especially on the PC platform. However, early performance tests conducted by reviewers are indicating that Forza Motorsport might not be the dreamboat it claims to be. Even with the fastest GPUs available, most testers are reporting less than satisfactory results.
Extended Development Phase
Forza Motorsport has historically followed a two-year release schedule since its debut in 2005. However, this time, fans had to wait three times longer for the new installment. Turn 10 Studios, the developers behind the game, attribute this extended development phase to various factors, including the impact of COVID-19 and their desire to overhaul many aspects of the game, such as the physics simulation system. According to Turn 10, the current title offers a significant fidelity jump compared to the previous release.
While the Xbox Series X version of Forza Motorsport is expected to deliver exceptional graphical improvements, including ray-traced effects, the same cannot be said for the PC version. The official system requirements for the game were recently shared, and they include CPU improvements like AMD FSR 2.2, NVIDIA DLSS 2 upscalers, and Microsoft’s DirectStorage to enhance loading times.
Here are the recommended specs:
- 16 GB RAM
- AMD Ryzen 7 5800x
- RTX 4080
- NvME SSD
Unfortunately, even with a high-end test bed that includes an RTX 4090, 32 GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Forza Motorsport did not perform well during testing. The game struggled to maintain 40 FPS with ray tracing enabled, even when using the NVIDIA DLSS Performance Mode. Disabling ray tracing only resulted in a 10 FPS improvement, with the frame rate remaining unimpressive.
What About AMD GPUs?
To determine whether NVIDIA GPUs are solely responsible for the poor performance, testing was conducted using an AMD Radeon 7900 XTX. Surprisingly, the performance was slightly better compared to the RTX 4090, indicating that the issue may not be GPU-specific.
The Driver-Related Issues Need to Be Fixed
It appears that the low performance experienced during testing is likely due to game or driver-related issues. This is disappointing considering the reputation of Forza games as technical marvels with awe-inspiring visuals. The developers at Turn 10 and NVIDIA have been made aware of the issue, and we hope they can quickly address it with a patch.