Forza Motorsport’s PC performance is horrendous, caps at 40 FPS with an RTX 4090 GPU
It’s been over six years since the last Forza Motorsport game was released. The latest entry into the fray hopes to wow its consumers, with developers Turn 10 at the helm. Boasting enhanced AI, a new renderer, and dynamic weather, the players have high expectations over the soon-to-be-released title—especially on PC. The racing genre in the platform has set new heights for ray-traced effects and visual excellence, thanks to series like Forza Horizon and F1.
Unfortunately, after some early performance tests made by reviewers, it looks like Forza Motorsport isn’t the absolute dreamboat it claims to be. Most testers got less than satisfactory results even on the fastest GPUs available.
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All Bark No Bite
Turn 10 Studios previously kept a stable schedule by releasing a new installment every two years since Forza Motorsport debuted in the OG Xbox console in 2005, but for this release, we had to wait thrice as long. According to the devs, the extended development phase was due to a multitude of factors. COVID contributed to the delays, as with any game made during 2020 and 2021. Moreover, Turn 10 wanted to overhaul most of the underlying aspects of Forza Motorsport, such as the physics simulation system, which is described to be much more realistic now. The developers also mentioned that the current title features a 48x fidelity jump compared to the previous release.
Turn 10 claimed the game would have significant graphical improvements ahead of its launch, flaunting features like ambient occlusion, volumetric fog, a fully procedural cloud system, physically based rendering, and real-time ray-traced reflections. These buzzwords sound like a dream come true, especially for the Xbox Series X owners, who can tap into Performance Ray Tracing (4k, 60 FPS, ray-tracing on), Performance (4k, 60 FPS), and Visual (4k, ray-tracing on, 30 FPS) mode. However, the same can’t be said for the PC version.
Turn 10 shared the official system requirements needed to run Forza Motorsport about a month ago. What’s worth noting is that you’ll need AMD FSR 2.2, the NVIDIA DLSS 2 upscalers, and Microsoft’s DirectStorage. This adds CPU improvements when loading the files to memory, decreasing loading times.
Here are the ideal specs to run the game:
- 16 GB RAM
- AMD Ryzen 7 5800x
- RTX 4080
- NvME SSD
WCCFTech recently tested their copy of Forza Motorsport using a much beefier test bed than what’s listed on top. Armed with an RTX 4090, 32 GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, you’d think the game would play perfectly. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.
Forza Motorsport is An Unplayable Mess On PC
Long story short? The game runs like crap. With ray tracing on to the max, Forza Motorsport is an unplayable mess. Even with the NVIDIA DLSS set to Performance Mode, the game has difficulty reaching 40 FPS. WCCFTech also tested the benchmark with ray tracing off, but the frame rate only improved by 10 FPS. Plus, the stutter count was even higher.
At 4k resolution, ultra graphic settings, ray tracing enabled, and DLSS Performance on, you’re looking at a paltry 39 FPS on average—-with lows of 13 FPS. And that’s with a PC with an RTX 4090 GPU and AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. As it stands, Forza Motorsport will likely only produce 20 FPS or less without DLSS at 4k.
If you thought that ray tracing was the cause of the issue, that’s not possible—with Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion disabled, you only get a 10 FPS gain. So essentially, you’re looking at about an average of 25 FPS (or less) at 4k native.
What About AMD GPUs?
To gain insight into whether this is simply an issue with NVIDIA GPUs, let’s take a look at PCGamesN’s testing using the following hardware:
- AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
- 32 GB of RAM
- AMD Radeon 7900 XTX
- NVMe SSD
- 32 GB DDRR5 7
Surprisingly, the performance was better, but not by a long shot. You can achieve about 78 FPS at native 4k without ray tracing enabled. Once you turn on ray tracing to the max, it plummets to 50 FPS. If we compare the frames from the RTX 4090 and AMD Radeon 7900 XTX, the performance isn’t as problematic, which suggests that this may be where the issue lies.
The Driver-Related Issues Need to Be Fixed
It looks like the low performance registered in WCCFTech’s test for Forza Motorsport is caused by some game or driver-related issues. It’s a shame, though, since Forza games are always a technical marvel, with visuals leaving players in awe. This is especially true for the most recent Forza game, which many reviewers still use in benchmarking tests for new GPUs.
The developers and NVIDIA have already been informed about this so that they can investigate the issue. We’re hoping that Turn 10 can make the necessary adjustments and release a patch for this sooner rather than later.
