Forza Horizon 6 PC Performance Analysis & Tuning Guide – How To Get Best Experience On PC

With PC games becoming increasingly complex nowadays — especially large-scale open-world games with dense environments, high-speed traversal, and ray/path tracing — default/maxed-out graphics settings rarely, if ever, strike the optimal balance between visual fidelity and performance that most PC gamers seek, and Forza Horizon 6 is no exception to this rule.

Thankfully, Playground Games’ latest open-world racing title arrives on PC with an impressively complete graphics menu, support for modern temporal upscaling solutions, uncapped framerates, ultrawide support, ray-traced reflections, ray-traced global illumination, and even live previews for many of its individual graphics settings.

However, while Forza Horizon 6 is a fairly polished PC release in several important ways, the game is not without issues. In our testing, we noticed shader compilation-related stutters during the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay, occasional traversal stutters, some strange CPU-limited behavior, and ray-traced effects that can suffer from visible noise, especially at low resolutions.

This guide should hopefully help you strike an optimal balance between visuals and performance in Forza Horizon 6. In it, we will first provide you with a brief technical overview of the game, explore the game’s CPU performance with ray tracing enabled and disabled, and then break down how each relevant graphics setting impacts both performance and visuals. Finally, we will present our ready-to-use optimized graphics settings, including both RT and non-RT configurations, in addition to a few extra tips that should help improve your overall experience with the game.

A Brief Technical Overview Of Forza Horizon 6

Released on May 19, 2026, on PC and Xbox Series X|S — with early access beginning on May 15 for Premium Edition/Premium Upgrade owners — Forza Horizon 6 is the latest entry in Playground Games’ critically acclaimed open-world racing franchise. This time, the Horizon Festival heads to Japan, delivering what is arguably the most requested setting in the series’ history.

As expected from a modern Forza Horizon title, the game combines high-speed arcade racing, dense open-world exploration, hundreds of cars, dynamic weather, seasonal changes, and a massive suite of PC graphics options. The PC version also comes with several platform-specific features, including high uncapped framerates, ultrawide support, NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution/(Multi) Frame Generation, AMD FSR upscaling, Intel XeSS Super Resolution, ray-traced reflections, and ray-traced global illumination.

Let’s begin by taking a look at the game’s PC system requirements, courtesy of the developers:

Tier	CPU	GPU	RAM	Storage	Performance Targets / Notes
Minimum	Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 1600	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 / AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT / Intel Arc A380	16 GB	SSD	Low preset, 1080p, 60 FPS
Recommended	Intel Core i5-12400F / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT / Intel Arc A580	16 GB	SSD	High preset, 1440p, 60+ FPS
Extreme	Intel Core i7-12700K / AMD Ryzen 7 7700X	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT	24 GB	NVMe SSD	Extreme preset, 4K, 60+ FPS
Extreme Ray Tracing	Intel Core i7-12700K / AMD Ryzen 7 7700X	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT	32 GB	NVMe SSD	Extreme RT preset, 4K upscaled, 60+ FPS

As we can see from the above table, Forza Horizon 6 is not absurdly demanding at the lower end, but the picture changes quite a bit once you start targeting Extreme settings, 4K, and especially with ray tracing. The game’s official Extreme Ray Tracing tier is clearly built around high-end modern GPUs, which makes sense considering that RT reflections and RTGI can both be enabled only on PC.

It is also worth mentioning that Forza Horizon 6 does not support NVIDIA GTX 10 Series and older GPUs as part of its official minimum specification, while AMD Polaris and Vega GPUs are also below the minimum supported architecture. The Forza Support page specifically warns that these older architectures are not guaranteed to work properly, which is important for users still running cards such as the GTX 1070, GTX 1080, or Radeon RX 400/500 series.

On the technological side, Forza Horizon 6 supports a strong selection of modern rendering features. NVIDIA GeForce RTX users get DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA, Reflex, Frame Generation on RTX 40 Series and newer GPUs, and Multi Frame Generation on RTX 50 Series GPUs. AMD Radeon RX users get FSR 3.1.5 (pre-RDNA4 GPUs) or FSR 4/4.1 upscaling (RDNA4 GPUs), while Intel Arc users get XeSS Super Resolution 2.1. However, based on our testing, frame generation support is sadly limited to NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation, with no AMD FSR Frame Generation or Intel XeSS Frame Generation support available at launch. Hopefully, Playground Games will add both FSR and XeSS frame generation support in a future update.

Stuttering, Shader Compilation, CPU Behavior, And Benchmarking Notes

Before we move into the graphics settings themselves, we should discuss one of the more frustrating parts of the game’s current PC version: stuttering.

In our testing, Forza Horizon 6 sadly stuttered quite a bit during the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay, most likely due to just-in-time Pipeline State Object (PSO)/shader compilation. This is not the catastrophic mess that we have seen in some past PC releases, but it is still noticeable enough that the first stretch of gameplay can feel rougher than it should.

The good news is that this behavior seems to improve after the game has had enough time to compile and cache its needed PSOs. The bad news is that this does not eliminate every hitch. We also noticed occasional traversal stutters and strange CPU-limited performance issues, which is not too surprising for an open-world racing game where the player is constantly moving through the world at extremely high speeds.

The game also appears to use many CPU cores, but like many modern open-world titles, the bottleneck at very high framerates will likely be the CPU memory subsystem — caches, memory latency, and memory bandwidth — rather than just raw core count, PPC (performance per clock cycle), or clock speed past a certain point. This is why AMD Ryzen X3D CPUs and well-tuned Intel Core 12th-gen and up systems may end up performing particularly well in CPU-limited scenarios.

We also recommend some caution with the in-game benchmark. While Forza Horizon 6 does include a benchmark mode, which Forza Support describes as a way to assess performance, our testing showed some performance inconsistencies, especially after changing settings without restarting the game.

As a result, we preferred to use real gameplay test scenes for our optimized settings comparisons, including a night race segment for non-RT testing and an open-world daylight roaming segment for RT testing.

CPU Benchmarks

Before moving on to exploring the game’s graphics settings, we also performed a few CPU benchmarks in Forza Horizon 6, as open-world racing games can become surprisingly CPU-heavy in dense areas such as cities. For this test, we used a bustling part of the game’s miniature Tokyo City, which should put more pressure on the CPU than open countryside driving due to its denser geometry, traffic, crowds, lighting, and streaming workloads.

The CPU benchmarks in this section, and graphics settings video comparisons in the next section, have all been made on a system with the following relevant specs:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K;
• RAM: 32 GB DDR5-7000 CL34;
• Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD;
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB;
• Operating System: Windows 11 25H2;
• All system firmware, drivers, BIOS, and OS updates were fully applied before testing.

To make the test as CPU-bound as possible, we benchmarked the game at a resolution of 1080p with DLSS Super Resolution set to Ultra Performance mode, using both the Extreme and Extreme+RT presets. The results were captured with CapFrameX, which records framerates, frametimes, display times, and various hardware sensor data during gameplay, making it well-suited for real-world gameplay benchmarking.

As we can see from the above results, the game seems to perform relatively well on our test system, though the 1% and 0.1% lows could certainly be better. Still, the CPU performance is absolutely not disastrous, thankfully.

We can also observe that the Extreme+RT preset — with ray-traced GI and ray-traced reflections enabled instead of the Extreme preset’s screen-space equivalents — incurs 14%/8%/0% hits to average FPS/1% low FPS/0.1% low FPS, respectively. This makes sense, as ray tracing is not free on the CPU side either: while bounding volume hierarchy (BVH)/acceleration structure traversal and builds are GPU-side operations, the engine still has to manage, update, stream, and submit the ray-tracing scene data as the player moves through the world, and these operations are performed by the CPU.

Overall, Forza Horizon 6 seems to behave like a typical modern open-world title on the CPU side. It can use many cores, but in demanding dense city scenarios, the performance ceiling will likely depend just as much on the CPU memory subsystem as it does on raw clock speeds or core count. High-refresh-rate monitor users should therefore pay close attention to CPU performance, especially when targeting 120 FPS or above.

A Deep Dive Into Forza Horizon 6’s Graphics Settings

In this section, we will explore the various graphics settings in Forza Horizon 6 via comparison screenshots and videos that should showcase both the visual and performance profiles of each relevant setting. This should allow us to determine which combination of settings strikes the best visuals-to-performance balance, which is the basis for establishing optimized graphics settings in all PC games.

Also, please be aware of the fact that the graphics settings comparisons in this section were made under the following GPU-limited conditions:

• Resolution: 2560×1440
• Anti-Aliasing: TAA at native resolution
• TAA Sharpness: 0, to avoid sharpening artifacts
• Motion Blur: Off for most graphics comparisons, so it would not affect image clarity during motion
• Camera FOV values: left at default
• Baseline preset: Extreme
• Ray-traced settings: disabled unless explicitly tested
• Rasterized settings exceptions: Car Reflection Quality and Screen Space GI Quality were not maxed by the Extreme preset
• Ray-traced settings exceptions: RTGI and RT Reflections were tested separately

As we can see from the above screenshots, Forza Horizon 6’s graphics settings menu is impressively complete. One of the best additions is the inclusion of real-time previews for several graphics settings, which makes it much easier to understand what a setting is actually doing without needing to constantly jump in and out of gameplay, and we liked this feature so much that we decided to actively use it in our video comparisons! The game also displays CPU/GPU frametimes, real-time GPU VRAM, and system memory usage, which is a great feature that more PC games should adopt, in our view. Forza Support also confirms that Forza Horizon 6’s PC render settings can be changed without restarting the game, though we urge caution with this fact as some settings can fail to properly apply until the game is restarted.

In what follows, we will be taking a deep dive into the performance/visuals profile — by analyzing comparison videos — of every relevant graphics setting that the game has on offer.

Note: Due to Forza Horizon 6’s dynamic weather and time-of-day systems, capturing perfectly identical conditions across every comparison proved nearly impossible. While we tried to keep our captures as consistent as possible in terms of location, camera angle, time window, and gameplay scenario, minor differences in lighting, cloud coverage, road wetness, or atmospheric conditions may still be present between shots.

Anti-aliasing And Upscaling

Forza Horizon 6 supports several anti-aliasing and temporal reconstruction options, including TAA, DLAA, FSR AA, and XeSS AA, in addition to DLSS Super Resolution, FSR upscaling, XeSS Super Resolution, and FidelityFX CAS spatial upscaler. In our testing, all AA/upscaling comparisons were done with sharpness set to 0, since additional sharpening can easily mask reconstruction artifacts or introduce its own artifacts.

Generally speaking, our recommendation is simple: use the best reconstruction solution available for your GPU. NVIDIA RTX users should use DLAA at native resolution or DLSS Super Resolution when they need more performance. AMD RDNA 4 users should use FSR 4 AA/upscaling, Intel Arc users should use XeSS AA/Super Resolution, and users on other modern GPUs should use FSR 3.1.5. TAA remains a decent fallback for older GPUs, though they may not be officially supported by either the game or their associated drivers.

We also strongly recommend avoiding FidelityFX CAS Spatial Upscaler. It may be useful as a last-resort spatial scaler, but it is not competitive with modern temporal reconstruction solutions in motion, and Forza Horizon 6 is a game where image quality should always be evaluated while driving, not while staring at a static screenshot.

There are also a few important DLSS-specific caveats. DLSS Super Resolution quality modes appear to scale with NVIDIA’s recommended presets. This means that older RTX GPUs may suffer more in some modes, and Performance/Ultra Performance modes can appear sharper than Balanced/Quality/DLAA modes because they use different DLSS presets. In our testing, DLSS preset K showed very noticeable ghosting under the car, while forcing presets M or L could improve this issue, albeit at a performance cost. FSR 4+ also seemed to handle this specific artifact much better.

It is also worth mentioning that GeForce RTX 40 Series users can use DLSS Frame Generation, while GeForce RTX 50 Series users can additionally leverage DLSS Multi Frame Generation to further improve perceived smoothness by inserting AI-generated frames between traditionally rendered ones. As always, this comes with trade-offs, including added latency and potentially visible visual artifacts, so we recommend using FG/MFG only when the base framerate is already solid — ideally 60 FPS or higher — for the best overall experience. NVIDIA also pairs DLSS Frame Generation with Reflex Low Latency to help reduce the added latency, though it does not fully eliminate the need for a high base framerate.

One particularly strange aspect of Forza Horizon 6’s current PC version is that NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency does not appear to function properly on its own, at least in our testing. As a result, enabling DLSS Frame Generation or Multi Frame Generation — which also forces Reflex on — can actually result in lower overall latency than running the game without FG/MFG enabled, which is admittedly quite counterintuitive. Playground Games should therefore fix Reflex so that it works correctly as a standalone latency-reduction option, while also adding equivalent technologies for other GPU vendors, such as AMD Anti-Lag 2 and Intel Xe Low Latency. Both Anti-Lag 2 and XeLL are designed to reduce rendering latency in a similar fashion to Reflex, particularly when frame generation is enabled.

Car Level of Detail

Car Level of Detail controls the geometric complexity and detail of vehicles, especially at varying distances. Since cars are obviously central to Forza Horizon 6’s presentation, we do not recommend cutting this setting too aggressively.

In our testing, High provided the best balance here. It keeps car quality very high in actual gameplay while saving some performance compared to the highest settings. Going lower can introduce more noticeable LOD transitions and reduce the visual quality of nearby vehicles, which is rarely worth it in a racing game.

Recommendation: High

Environment Texture Quality

Environment Texture Quality controls the resolution of the game’s textures. This setting is heavily dependent on your GPU’s VRAM capacity, internal rendering resolution, and whether ray tracing is enabled.

At 1440p (our tested resolution), we recommend the following rough VRAM guidance:

Environment Texture Quality	Suggested VRAM Target At 1440p
Extreme	12+ GB
Ultra	10+ GB
High	8+ GB
Medium	8+ GB
Low	8+ GB

Ray tracing increases VRAM requirements by at least 2 GB, while 4K can add another 2 GB or more, depending on the exact settings. Upscaling can alleviate some VRAM pressure by lowering internal render resolution, but it will not magically solve every GPU memory issue.

There is also one major quirk: setting Environment Texture Quality to High forces Environment Geometry Quality to High. This means that 8 GB GPUs may effectively be forced into a lower environment geometry setting as well, since they will often need Environment Texture Quality set to High to stay within a safe VRAM budget.

Recommendation: Depends on VRAM capacity, render resolution, and RT usage

Environment Geometry Quality

Environment Geometry Quality controls the level of detail of the game world, including distant environmental geometry and foliage density/visibility.

This setting has a noticeable impact on distant scenery. Dropping it to High can cause foliage to disappear from distant mountains and plains, not to mention that it can also increase pop-in. For users with more than 8 GB of VRAM, Ultra provides the best balance between image quality and performance. However, users with 6–8 GB GPUs will likely need to use High, especially because when Environment Texture Quality is set to High, it also forces Environment Geometry Quality to High.

Recommendation: Ultra for >8 GB VRAM / High for 6–8 GB VRAM

Car Reflection Quality

Car Reflection Quality affects the quality of reflections on vehicles, which is naturally important in a game where cars occupy a large portion of the screen, though this, of course, depends on your chosen camera.

The good news is that Ultra looks great and does not need to be sacrificed in our optimized settings. Since car paint, glass, and metallic surfaces are so central to the game’s visual identity, this is one of the last settings we would reduce.

Recommendation: Ultra

Screen Space Reflections Quality

Screen Space Reflections Quality controls SSR-based reflections. These are cheaper than ray-traced reflections, but they suffer from the usual screen-space limitations, such as missing reflected objects that are not visible on screen.

For the optimized non-RT settings, we recommend High, as it offers a good compromise between visual quality and performance. However, if you are using ray-traced reflections, then SSR will be disabled, since RT reflections will handle all the relevant reflection work.

Recommendation: High for optimized non-RT / Off for optimized RT

Raytraced Reflections Quality

Raytraced reflections enable ray-traced reflections on cars and the environment. This can improve reflection accuracy compared to SSR, especially in cases where screen-space reflections break down.

That said, Forza Horizon 6 is a very fast game, and the visual benefits of ray-traced reflections are not always easy to appreciate during actual racing. They are more noticeable in slower camera movement, photo mode, garage scenes, and specific wet/reflective environments.

For our optimized RT settings, Low is the best balance. If you are not using RT, this setting will obviously be disabled.

Recommendation: Off for optimized non-RT / Low for optimized RT

Shadow Quality

Shadow Quality controls the resolution and filtering quality of the game’s shadow maps. Shadows in Forza Horizon 6 are important for grounding cars, foliage, buildings, and environmental detail.

In our testing, Ultra provided excellent quality without requiring a major enough performance sacrifice to justify dropping lower in our optimized profile. Since Forza Horizon 6’s environments are often dense, sunny, and full of moving geometry, shadow quality has a meaningful impact on overall image fidelity.

Recommendation: Ultra

Night Shadows

Night Shadows specifically affect shadow quality in night scenes, where artificial lights, headlights, and street lighting can create many shadowed areas.

Night racing is one of the most visually striking parts of Forza Horizon 6, and lowering this setting can make night scenes look flatter or less convincing. We recommend keeping it at Ultra.

Recommendation: Ultra

Screen Space Global Illumination Quality

Screen Space GI Quality affects screen-space diffuse indirect lighting. It can improve the sense of depth and ambient bounce lighting in rasterized mode, but like all screen-space effects, it has limitations.

For optimized non-RT settings, Medium is the best balance. It keeps some of the added depth and indirect lighting benefit without costing too much performance. For optimized RT settings, this will be turned off, as RTGI replaces its role more effectively.

Recommendation: Medium for optimized non-RT / Off for optimized RT

Raytraced Global Illumination Quality

Raytraced GI Quality controls RTGI, which uses GPU ray tracing cores to compute more accurate diffuse indirect lighting and occlusion across cars and the open world. Forza Support describes RTGI as a PC feature that computes more accurate indirect lighting and occlusion in real time.

The issue is that Forza Horizon 6’s RTGI can suffer from very visible noise (especially on foliage) when set below High, especially when paired with lower internal resolutions via aggressive temporal upscaling. This is exactly where technologies such as DLSS Ray Reconstruction or FSR Ray Regeneration would be extremely helpful, but the game sadly does not currently include these machine learning-assisted denoising techs.

For our optimized RT settings, Medium is the best recommendation. Users who are very sensitive to RTGI noise may want to try High instead, but the performance cost will obviously be higher.

Recommendation: Off for optimized non-RT / Medium for optimized RT / High if you can’t tolerate noise

Note: We made a small labeling mistake in our RTGI Quality comparison video: what is labeled as “Extreme” is actually the High setting, while what is labeled as “High” is actually the Medium setting. We apologize for the error.

Shader Quality

Shader Quality affects material shading complexity and overall surface richness.

In our testing, Extreme remained worth keeping. Dropping this setting did not offer a compelling enough visual-to-performance tradeoff, especially considering how much Forza Horizon 6 relies on high-quality car paint, road surfaces, foliage, wet materials, and environmental lighting to sell its presentation.

Recommendation: Extreme

Audio Quality

Audio Quality did not seem to have a meaningful CPU performance impact or obvious sound quality difference on our test system.

Because of that, we recommend leaving it at Ultra. Users with weaker CPUs can experiment with lowering it, but we do not expect it to be a major optimization lever for most systems.

Recommendation: Ultra

Deformable Terrain Quality

Deformable Terrain Quality controls the quality of terrain deformation effects, which are especially relevant during off-road driving.

This is one of the settings that contributes directly to Forza Horizon 6’s driving feel and environmental reactivity. The performance cost was not significant enough to justify lowering it in our optimized profile.

Recommendation: Extreme

Particle Effects Quality

Particle Effects Quality affects effects such as dust, smoke, debris, sparks, and other particle-heavy elements.

We recommend Ultra here. Extreme is not necessary, but lowering this too much can reduce the impact of off-road driving, collisions, and atmospheric effects.

Unfortunately, there is one specific visual issue worth mentioning: red smoke particles in some night/street race segments can look noticeably low quality, and none of the in-game settings appear to fully fix this outside of brute-forcing the game at native 4K or higher.

Recommendation: Ultra

Volumetric Fog Quality

Volumetric Fog Quality controls the quality of fog, mist, atmospheric scattering, and volumetric lighting.

Forza Horizon 6’s dynamic weather and time-of-day systems make volumetrics important for atmosphere, especially during rainy, foggy, or early-morning scenes. High provides the best balance here.

Recommendation: High

Lens Effects

Lens Effects controls post-processing elements such as lens simulation artifacts and related camera effects.

Medium provides a good balance. Going higher does not meaningfully improve the image in a way that justifies the cost or added post-processing intensity, while going too low can make the presentation feel slightly flatter.

Recommendation: Medium

Motion Blur Quality

Motion Blur Quality only applies if Motion Blur itself is set to either Short or Long. Since racing games can benefit from a well-implemented per-object/camera motion blur effect, the game itself recommends Short for higher framerates and Long for lower ones.

High Motion Blur Quality seems to provide the optimal performance/visuals ratio here, so it gets our pick.

Recommendation: High, with Motion Blur set to Short for higher FPS or Long for lower FPS

Optimized Graphics Settings

Wrapping it all up, here are the final recommended optimized graphics settings for Forza Horizon 6, which we feel strike the best balance between visuals and performance:

Optimized Graphics Settings — Non-RT

Graphics Setting	Optimized Value
Anti-aliasing	Depends on GPU: DLAA for RTX, FSR 4 AA for RDNA 4, XeSS AA for Intel Arc, FSR 3.1.5 for modern non-RTX/non-RDNA4 GPUs, TAA for older GPUs
Resolution Scaling / Upscaling	DLSS SR for RTX, FSR 4+ for RDNA 4, XeSS SR for Intel Arc, FSR 3.1.5 for other GPUs; avoid FidelityFX CAS Spatial Upscaler
Car Level of Detail	High
Environment Texture Quality	Depends on VRAM capacity, render resolution, and RT usage
Environment Geometry Quality	Ultra if >8 GB VRAM / High if 6–8 GB VRAM
Car Reflection Quality	Ultra
Screen Space Reflections Quality	High
Raytraced Reflections Quality	Off
Shadow Quality	Ultra
Night Shadows	Ultra
Screen Space GI Quality	Medium
Raytraced GI Quality	Off
Shader Quality	Extreme
Audio Quality	Ultra
Deformable Terrain Quality	Extreme
Particle Effects Quality	Ultra
Volumetric Fog Quality	High
Lens Effects	Medium
Motion Blur Quality	High, if Motion Blur is set to Short (higher FPS) or Long (lower FPS)

Optimized Graphics Settings — RT

Graphics Setting	Optimized Value
Anti-Aliasing	Depends on GPU: DLAA for RTX, FSR 4 AA for RDNA 4, XeSS AA for Intel Arc, FSR 3.1.5 for modern non-RTX/non-RDNA4 GPUs
Resolution Scaling / Upscaling	DLSS SR for RTX, FSR 4+ for RDNA 4, XeSS SR for Intel Arc, FSR 3.1.5 for other GPUs; avoid FidelityFX CAS Spatial Upscaler
Car Level of Detail	High
Environment Texture Quality	Depends on VRAM capacity, render resolution, and RT usage. RT will require VRAM capacity pressure
Environment Geometry Quality	Ultra if >10 GB VRAM / High if 8-10 GB VRAM
Car Reflection Quality	Ultra
Screen Space Reflections Quality	Off
Raytraced Reflections Quality	Low
Shadow Quality	Ultra
Night Shadows	Ultra
Screen Space GI Quality	Off
Raytraced GI Quality	Medium, or High if you cannot tolerate the noise
Shader Quality	Extreme
Audio Quality	Ultra
Deformable Terrain Quality	Extreme
Particle Effects Quality	Ultra
Volumetric Fog Quality	High
Lens Effects	Medium
Motion Blur Quality	High, if Motion Blur is set to Short (higher FPS) or Long (lower FPS)

With our optimized graphics settings established, let us look at how they improve performance — at a minor cost in terms of visual fidelity — on our test system versus the game’s Extreme and Extreme+RT presets:

Preset	Average FPS	1% Low	0.1% Low
Extreme	152	97	68
Optimized Non-RT	175	101	74
Improvement	+15%	+4%	+9%

As we can see from the above results, our optimized non-RT settings in a night race environment deliver a 15% uplift in average FPS, with smaller but still welcome gains to 1% lows and 0.1% lows. This is not a transformative improvement, but it is a very respectable increase considering that the optimized settings preserve most of Forza Horizon 6’s visual identity.

Preset	Average FPS	1% Low	0.1% Low
Extreme+RT	103	81	71
Optimized RT	127	85	77
Improvement	+23%	+5%	+8%

The optimized RT settings are even more effective, improving average FPS by 23% while also increasing 1% lows and 0.1% lows by 5% and 8%, respectively, in our open world roaming test scene. This makes the RT mode much more practical, though we still believe that many users will be better served by the optimized non-RT configuration due to the current RT noise issues (when RTGI is set lower than the GPU-intensive High setting) and the somewhat questionable visual payoff of ray tracing in a fast-paced arcade racing game.

In addition to our optimized graphics settings, you can further improve your Forza Horizon 6 experience with the following tips.

First, be careful with ray tracing. If you have enough GPU horsepower and can run RT at a high enough internal resolution, RT reflections and RTGI can improve the image in certain scenes. However, if you are relying on aggressive upscaling or lower RT settings, the added noise and performance hit may not be worth it. In our opinion, Forza Horizon 6’s RT implementation is best treated as an all-or-nothing luxury feature rather than something every player should enable.

Second, watch out for frame generation toggling an FPS lock via V-Sync. If you enable DLSS Frame Generation or Multi Frame Generation and suddenly notice that your framerate appears capped, double-check V-Sync and any FPS limiters.

Third, avoid modding the game, at least for now. Forza Horizon 6 is an online-connected game with multiplayer and anti-cheat considerations, so we do not recommend using DLL swaps, unofficial frame generation mods, or other invasive tweaks unless you fully understand the risks.

Fourth, AMD users experiencing stuttering may want to experiment with lowering Environment Texture Quality, disabling Resizable BAR/Smart Access Memory, trying different driver versions, and resetting the shader cache. Several users have also reported that reducing Environment Texture Quality — and, in some cases, Environment Geometry Quality — can help smooth out traversal hitches, while Playground Games appears to be looking into the issue (search “PC Framerate on AMD GPUs” in the previous link). Results may vary substantially depending on GPU, driver, platform, VRAM capacity, and whether the game is being played through Steam or the Xbox app/Microsoft Store.

Finally, remember that Forza Horizon 6’s dynamic weather and lighting systems make exact like-for-like visual comparisons extremely difficult. When comparing anti-aliasing, upscaling, RT, or post-processing options, always test in motion and across multiple conditions. A static screenshot is not enough to evaluate temporal stability in a racing game.

Final Words

Overall, Forza Horizon 6 is a strong PC release, though not a flawless one. The game offers a very complete graphics menu, support for modern upscalers, uncapped framerates, ultrawide support, real-time graphics previews, live memory readouts, and a genuinely impressive amount of scalability across different hardware configurations.

Visually, Forza Horizon 6 can look excellent, especially thanks to its dense environments, strong material work, great car rendering, dynamic weather, and atmospheric Japanese setting. However, the game is not always as clean as it should be. Some particle effects can look surprisingly low quality, RTGI can suffer from visible noise, DLSS SR can show distracting ghosting under the car with certain presets, and the lack of DLSS Ray Reconstruction or FSR Ray Regeneration is unfortunate for a game that leans on ray-traced global illumination.

Performance-wise, the game is mostly solid, but the first 30 minutes or so can be marred by shader comp stutters, and there are still occasional traversal stutters and strangely CPU-limited moments after that. Further, the 1%/0.1% lows figures of the game are also not that great in our view.

In the end, Forza Horizon 6 is a polished yet imperfect PC package. It performs well enough, scales across a wide range of hardware, and gives PC gamers an excellent number of options to tune the experience to their liking. However, ray tracing is not an automatic win; the game still needs some stutter-related improvements, and the developers should absolutely fix Reflex behavior while adding FSR/XeSS frame generation and better denoising options in future updates. For most users, our optimized non-RT settings will likely offer the best overall experience, while high-end GPU owners can try the optimized RT profile if they are willing to accept the added cost and occasional noise.

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