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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
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (Bone stock, no overlock, undervolt, etc)
- 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 or Ultra (High is mandatory for GPUs with 8GB)
Environment Geometry Quality - Extreme or Ultra (High is mandatory for GPUs with 8GB)
Car Reflection Quality - Extreme or High
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 (Off will net an additional performance gain in the neighborhood of 10%+)
Screen Space GI Quality - Off (Medium or High, with RT disabled; especially recommended for GPUs with 8GB)
Ray Traced GI Quality - Medium (Off if performance is a concern, SSGI is desirable alternative with near comparable visuals)
Shader Quality - High (Extreme if the GPU has enough grunt; this affects draw distance, shading and texture depth)
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.
UPDATED 5/19: FH6 has a pretty severe memory leak on PC and it's seemingly linked to Environment Texture and Geometry Quality, just as the previous game. Even if you're using more than 16GB of System RAM, I would highly recommend stepping down from 'Extreme' for both settings to 'Ultra' to mitigate the issue until a hotfix. Considering this was never resolved in Horizon 5, I wouldn't exactly hold my breath...
UPDATED 5/30: Optimized settings now account for an RTX 2080 as well and settings have been expanded or better defined to better showcase that. DLSS is a wee bit strange on the 2080 as 'Performance' results in an 11-13% performance loss over 'Balanced' and, as such, cannot be recommended for obvious reasons. Performance is a rock-solid 70+ FPS, with the biggest performance pitfall being Tokyo City.
Night Shadows can, at least theoretically, be turned to 'Ultra' and 'Extreme' while maintaining a comfortable 60-70+ FPS experience, however, as noted above the biggest pitfall with be Tokyo City, and even moreso with this more taxing setting enabled so be cautious.
If using a 1080p monitor, one adjustment to be made is foregoing DLSS Balanced and using native DLAA for better visual clarity. The card's 8GB buffer should never (at least ideally) be overtaxed with these settings as in my quick testing, it hardly broke above 5.5GB of usage.
