After six years, the latest Forza Motorsport entry has arrived on PC, with developers Turn 10 having crafted a new renderer, dynamic weather and enhanced AI. However, expectations have evolved too, especially on PC where the racing genre has set new heights for visual excellence and ray-traced effects with series like F1 and Forza Horizon. AAA PC gaming over the past two years has also seen plenty of disastrous releases, with a bad user experience and stutters out of the gate. In this review of the PC version of Forza Motorsport, we'll examine how the game meets those expectations, whether it stutters, how the PC and Xbox versions compare and the best settings to use for an optimised experience.
Before we get into comparisons and optimised settings, let's start with the user experience - and that all-important shader optimisation step, which required around 20 seconds on my Core i9 12900K before I could get into the game proper. This short delay is lengthier on slower CPUs, but translates into a title that is mercifully devoid of shader compilation stutter, one of the biggest spectres of PC gaming in 2023 - so kudos to Turn 10.
Unfortunately though, CPU performance is critical in Forza Motorsport, and older yet still popular CPUs like the Ryzen 5 3600 can fare poorly. I saw average frame-rates in the 40s with ultra settings when in the middle of a full 20-car race, even at 540p, though even racing alone CPU limitations can become evident. The track seems to be divided into multiple zones, and I noticed regular dips on the frame-time graph as I raced around the circuit. To avoid these drops at higher settings, you'll need to have a powerful CPU. Replays also seem more taxing than races, with 30 percent lower frame-rates in CPU-limited like-for-like scenarios.