Forza Horizon 6 Optimization GuidePC 

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Terronium-12

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Forza Horizon 6 is finally available to those willing to set aside $120 USD for the opportunity to play several days earlier than the rest. Not to mention the added benefits of having the Car Pass and both future Expansions in their back pocket. While that's all well and good, if you're on PC you may be on the tireless search of what settings work best for your hardware, and that's precisely what this guide is for — taking the headache away and giving me one instead.


FH6 is much easier to manage with its new 'Live Preview' of the settings, allowing you to see the changes in real-time. Unfortunately, it isn't available for every setting which has the knock-on effect of making it a bit pointless. Baby steps, I suppose. Something is better than nothing, after all. At least so they say.

So let's get right into it, shall we?

First and foremost, the test rig consists of the following:

  • AMD Ryzen 5 5800X with Performance Boost Overdrive (PBO) active
  • 16GB of DDR4 3600M/Ts @ 1.35v
  • Gigabyte X570 Aorus Ultra
  • XFX Speedster Merc319 Radeon RX 6900 XT Black with an undervolt of 1075mV from the base 1175mV
  • Corsair RM850x
  • Noctua NH-D14
  • Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB M.2 SSD (Where the game is installed)

Right away then, the settings I'd recommend are as follows:

Car Level of Detail - Extreme or High
Environment Texture Quality - Extreme (High is mandatory for GPUs with 8-12GB)
Environment Geometry Quality - Extreme or High (High is mandatory for GPUs with 8-12GB)
Car Reflection Quality - Extreme
Screen Space Reflections Quality - Off (High, with RT disabled; especially recommended for GPUs with 8-12GB)
Ray Traced Reflections Quality - High
Shadows Quality - Extreme or Ultra
Night Shadows Quality - Extreme or Ultra
Screen Space GI Quality - Off (High, with RT disabled; especially recommended for GPUs with 8-12GB)
Ray Traced GI Quality - Medium
Shader Quality - High
Deformable Terrain Quality - Extreme
Particle Effects Quality - Ultra
Volumetric Fog Quality - High

Let's address the elephant in the room: Ray Tracing. It comes in two flavors, Reflections and Global Illumination. While there's little to no real performance gain in lower RT Reflections, RT Global Illumination is a bit of a different beast. While 'Medium' is the recommended setting as it's substantially better than the more "basic" Screen Space alternative, it comes with the caveat of RT noise artifacts, especially on foliage.

For that reason alone, especially if you're sensitive to what appears to be RT boil and/or speckling, I'd actually recommend an alternative option of foregoing it entirely and using SSGI on 'High' or 'Ultra', but the choice is of course yours.

Upscaling is a mixed bag in FH6 just as it were in FH5 because the performance gains are minimal at best, however, it can be utilized to edge the performance into a consistent 60 fps experience at the very least. The game comes with DLSS 4.5, FSR 3.1.2 and XeSS 2.0 but unfortunately it only supports Multi-Frame Generation on the Nvidia side with no equivalent on the Intel or AMD side of things.

If your rig has the muscle to do so, DLAA, FSR Native AA and XeSS Native AA are the preferred methods for anti-aliasing over TAA.
 
I'm using Nvidia's own recommended settings through their app:
Full screen, 1440p, DLSS on quality, frame generation 2x, NVIDIA Reflex on
Car Level of Detail - Extreme
Environment Texture Quality - Extreme
Environment Geometry Quality - Extreme
Car Reflection Quality - Extreme
Screen Space Reflections Quality - Off
Ray Traced Reflections Quality - High
Shadows Quality - Extreme
Night Shadows Quality - Extreme or Ultra
Screen Space GI Quality - Off
Ray Traced GI Quality - High
Shader Quality - Extreme
Deformable Terrain Quality - Extreme
Particle Effects Quality - Ultra
Volumetric Fog Quality - Extreme

This is on an Intel i5-12600KF, with 32 GB of DDR4 RAM and an RTX 4070 Super GPU. I'm getting between 100-120 fps thanks to frame generation and there is only one area with a noticeable stutter: the road that leads north from Tokyo, it looks that the transition from one area to other triggers that.

Sunday update: I think the recommended settings stress my card a lot, and I don't like the artifacts from frame generation so, in order to get a visual/performance target of 83 fps without frame generation (half of my 165Hz monitor) I scaled down the overall settings to the Ultra+RT preset and that works just fine. If the visual noise of the ray traced GI quality at medium bothers you, especially in wooded areas, just set it on high.

Mid-morning Sunday update: I don't know why, but I started having noticeable frame dips below 60 fps in the aforementioned Ultra+RT AND Extreme non-RT modes (but no noticeable stutters), so I've switched to a pure Ultra non-RT preset and that seems to be steady while still delivering polished visuals. Man, this game will probably put me on notice for a hardware update...
 
Last edited:
Thanks @Terronium-12 gave me a good start point to go from.

Here are my specs and my settings:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6gb
Intel Core i5-13420H (2.10ghz)
32gb DDR5

Resolution: 2560x1080
Car Level of Detail - Ultra
Environment Texture Quality - High
Environment Geometry Quality - High
Car Reflection Quality - Ultra
Screen Space Reflections Quality - High
Ray Traced Reflections Quality - Off
Shadows Quality - High
Night Shadows Quality - High
Screen Space GI Quality - High
Ray Traced GI Quality - Off
Shader Quality - High
Deformable Terrain Quality - High
Particle Effects Quality - Ultra
Volumetric Fog Quality - High

DLSS Mode is balanced
Model preset M forced on in Nvidia App

I get 45-60fps depending on how much is going on on screen, I could easily make adjustments to reach a more stable 60fps but this is a nice balance of quality, detail and performance.
 
Windows laptop:

CPU: Intel Core i7-9750H CPU @2.60GHz (2.59GHz)
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650
RAM: 16GB
OS: Windows 11

Driver fully updated, just figuring out how to make it run a stable 60fps
 
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