We wouldn’t recommend going too far below the recommended specs, but as our results show, Forza Horizon 5 has a lot of bandwidth when it comes to performance. The good news is that Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t require a particularly powerful CPU, and if you have an older or low-end GPU, our testing shows that the processor doesn’t play much of a role past 1080p. As we’ll dig into in the next section, though, you’ll need a little more power if you want to turn all of the sliders up. Those cards are powerful but much less than what we expected from a franchise known for its visual flare. Where games like Far Cry 6and Back 4 Bloodcall for the latest GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, Forza Horizon 5 only calls for an RX 590 or GTX 1070 with its recommended specs. Forza Horizon 5 system requirementsįorza Horizon 5 is a big-budget AAA game from 2021, but you wouldn’t know that from the system requirements. It looks terrible, too, implying reflections without actually showing them. We didn’t see any performance increase with this setting, even when we turned SSR off entirely. If you were hoping to earn some extra frames with SSR (screen space reflection) quality, don’t bother. Reflection quality brought a 9% increase at the Very Low setting, though once again, we compromised with the Medium setting in our optimized list. But if you’re running into performance issues, shader quality is a good place to look. We kept this setting to High in our optimized list because there’s a large trade-off in visual quality. Shader quality represented the biggest increase in performance, though, increasing our average frame rate by a massive 14% at the lowest setting. This is definitely an option if your hardware is struggling. The game doesn’t look great without shadows, but it doesn’t look bad, either. You can actually turn the shadows off entirely, which resulted in a solid 8% increase in our average frame rate. We left the setting off for most of our testing, though we can confirm that there’s no performance difference in-game with ray tracing turned on.įor the settings that make a difference, we found the largest gains with shadows, shader quality, and reflection quality. Ray tracing is exclusively part of Forzavista, where you can view car models up close. Forza Horizon 5 technically supports ray tracing, but you won’t see it in-game. There are a lot of interesting notes to point here. Here are the best settings for Forza Horizon 5: Using the Extreme preset as a baseline, we tested each setting individually to find the ones that offer the highest performance gains with the lowest drop in image quality.
Like Forza Horizon 4, the newest entry in the franchise is highly scalable, and the options leave the door open to a lot of different configurations. The best settings for Forza Horizon 5įorza Horizon 5 has 17 graphics options, and that doesn’t include options pertaining to your display like the game’s built-in frame rate limiter. We’re going to run through the best settings we found through testing, as well as what performance you can expect when you boot up the game.
You don’t have to change much to get Forza Horizon 5 performing well, and almost regardless of your settings, the game looks great.