Forza Motorsport is in some ways the best game in the series, and in some ways it’s also the worst. Tl;dr, the negative status of this review is almost entirely due to the inexcusable technical issues that this game has, and may change to a positive review in the future if Turn 10 is able to turn 180 degrees and fix their game.

Unfortunately my review is too long for Steam's liking, so I'll cut out the part where I praise the vastly improved physics and AI. I'll skip straight to the negative stuff, since that's what's important here.


Every other Forza game that has released on PC is one that I’ve preordered and played at launch. That means Horizon 3, Motorsport 7, and Horizon 4 and 5. Some of those games had a few technical issues at launch but they were annoying hiccups that didn’t warrant a negative review. This game and its heaping mountain of problems, however, is different. I don’t even know where to start.

Well, I’ll start by mentioning my specs. I’ve got a Ryzen 7 3700X, an RTX 3080, 32GBs of RAM, and the game is installed on a 2TB NVMe SSD. No, I don’t have a futureproof rocketship PC, but it’s still adequately decent and should theoretically be able to exceed the capabilities of a current-gen Xbox, generally speaking. The truth is that Forza Motorsport is extremely poorly optimized, however, and the visual settings seem to have no impact on performance whatsoever. The worst part is that changing any settings at all necessitates a game restart, because otherwise the game will overcommit video memory and make the game run even slower. Check this out.

Leaving all of the graphical settings at max (except raytracing, which I kept off), I lowered the game’s resolution to 1080p and then enabled DLSS’s “ultra performance” mode. This meant that Forza was rendering at an EVEN LOWER RESOLUTION (900p or possibly even 720p) and then upscaling to 1080p. I restarted the game after changing these settings and then ran the benchmark. The game looked like complete trash. I got an average of 53 fps. Cool.

After this, I turned DLSS completely off and cranked the game up to a native 4k, forcing the game to render at that resolution 100% of the time, and then restarted the game again. Now, since 4k is near-as-makes-no-difference 4x as big as 1080p, you would expect that this would be AT LEAST 4x as taxing on my system, if not more, since Forza was previously rendering a picture at sub-1080p levels. But lo and behold, I ran the benchmark tool again. I got an average 58 fps. That’s right, my average frame rate INCREASED by 5 frames. Sure, Forza, THAT makes sense.

As of the time of this writing, there have been no Forza-specific video drivers from AMD or Nvidia. Lowering the game’s resolution will throw the positioning of the window off, resulting in you either being able to see a sliver of your desktop background on one side, having weird lines of pixels being rendered on the edge of your second monitor, or in my case, both. There’s the aforementioned settings bug that forces you to restart the game any time you tweak anything. The game forces TAA (temporal anti-aliasing), which causes literally any moving object to ghost like crazy and distracts you from the game itself, and you can’t turn it off. The game forces extremely aggressive depth-of-field, which already artistically looks bad, which is then COMPOUNDED by the forced TAA. This is most noticeable on the main menu, where half of your car is crystal clear and the other half of your car fades into a blurry pixelated mess that almost makes it look like it’s being bitcrushed. The visual options that the game lets you change are minimal, which defeats the whole point of owning a PC game to begin with. Not to mention that, again, they don’t make a lick of difference when it comes to performance anyway. Sometimes the game crashes on loading screens. Objects pop into existence as if my SSD is a 10 year old HDD instead. The in-game camera stutters if you have V-sync disabled, even though choosing a framerate option will lock the game to that framerate regardless of your V-sync settings. And did I mention the game is always online? That’s fun.

Forza Motorsport is a great game hidden behind an awful PC experience. I’d expect this from a third-party developer that has no experience with PC as a platform, or from some outsourced team that’s been brought in to port an older console game to PC without having access to the source code or something. But a AAA flagship game that spent over half a decade in development by one of Microsoft’s internal teams? That’s inexcusable. Like I said, I’ll flip this review to a positive one if the technical issues get ironed out. But Turn 10’s got a long way to go.

Forza Motorsport is in some ways the best game in the series, and in some ways it’s also the worst. Tl;dr, the negative status of this review is almost entirely due to the inexcusable technical issues that this game has, and may change to a positive review in the future if Turn 10 is able to turn 180 degrees and fix their game. Unfortunately my review is too long for Steam's liking, so I'll cut out the part where I praise the vastly improved physics and AI. I'll skip straight to the negative stuff, since that's what's important here. [h1]Forza Motorsport is, in its current launch state, [b]an unmitigated technical disaster.[/b][/h1] Every other Forza game that has released on PC is one that I’ve preordered and played at launch. That means Horizon 3, Motorsport 7, and Horizon 4 and 5. Some of those games had a few technical issues at launch but they were annoying hiccups that didn’t warrant a negative review. This game and its heaping mountain of problems, however, is different. I don’t even know where to start. Well, I’ll start by mentioning my specs. I’ve got a Ryzen 7 3700X, an RTX 3080, 32GBs of RAM, and the game is installed on a 2TB NVMe SSD. No, I don’t have a futureproof rocketship PC, but it’s still adequately decent and should theoretically be able to exceed the capabilities of a current-gen Xbox, generally speaking. The truth is that Forza Motorsport is extremely poorly optimized, however, and the visual settings seem to have no impact on performance whatsoever. The worst part is that changing any settings at all necessitates a game restart, because otherwise the game will overcommit video memory and make the game run even slower. Check this out. Leaving all of the graphical settings at max (except raytracing, which I kept off), I lowered the game’s resolution to 1080p and then enabled DLSS’s “ultra performance” mode. This meant that Forza was rendering at an EVEN LOWER RESOLUTION (900p or possibly even 720p) and then [i]upscaling to 1080p[/i]. I restarted the game after changing these settings and then ran the benchmark. The game looked like complete trash. I got an average of 53 fps. Cool. After this, I turned DLSS completely off and cranked the game up to a native 4k, forcing the game to render at that resolution 100% of the time, and then restarted the game again. Now, since 4k is near-as-makes-no-difference 4x as big as 1080p, you would expect that this would be AT LEAST 4x as taxing on my system, if not more, since Forza was previously rendering a picture at sub-1080p levels. But lo and behold, I ran the benchmark tool again. I got an average 58 fps. That’s right, my average frame rate INCREASED by 5 frames. Sure, Forza, THAT makes sense. As of the time of this writing, there have been no Forza-specific video drivers from AMD or Nvidia. Lowering the game’s resolution will throw the positioning of the window off, resulting in you either being able to see a sliver of your desktop background on one side, having weird lines of pixels being rendered on the edge of your second monitor, or in my case, both. There’s the aforementioned settings bug that forces you to restart the game any time you tweak anything. The game forces TAA (temporal anti-aliasing), which causes literally any moving object to ghost like crazy and distracts you from the game itself, and you can’t turn it off. The game forces extremely aggressive depth-of-field, which already artistically looks bad, which is then COMPOUNDED by the forced TAA. This is most noticeable on the main menu, where half of your car is crystal clear and the other half of your car fades into a blurry pixelated mess that almost makes it look like it’s being bitcrushed. The visual options that the game lets you change are minimal, which defeats the whole point of owning a PC game to begin with. Not to mention that, again, they don’t make a lick of difference when it comes to performance anyway. Sometimes the game crashes on loading screens. Objects pop into existence as if my SSD is a 10 year old HDD instead. The in-game camera stutters if you have V-sync disabled, even though choosing a framerate option will lock the game to that framerate regardless of your V-sync settings. And did I mention the game is always online? That’s fun. Forza Motorsport is a great game hidden behind an awful PC experience. I’d expect this from a third-party developer that has no experience with PC as a platform, or from some outsourced team that’s been brought in to port an older console game to PC without having access to the source code or something. But a AAA flagship game that spent [i][b]over half a decade in development[/b][/i] by one of Microsoft’s internal teams? That’s inexcusable. Like I said, I’ll flip this review to a positive one if the technical issues get ironed out. But Turn 10’s got a long way to go.