When the long-awaited Forza Motorsport finally arrived for review, there was some disappointment as the visual quality didn’t quite live up to expectations – especially as promised features such as ray traced global lighting didn’t make it into the final game, while the PC’s technical performance was problematic. However, we learned a little while ago from user LJT that the PC game can be modified to add more details, improved RT and RTGI reflections, while reports of improved performance since launch required some investigation. So how does the mod improve visual fidelity and what are the performance implications? Did the CPU and GPU optimizations give a performance boost over game launch? We decided to find out.
Hooking up the mod turns out to be amazingly easy. Simply set everything to maximum settings on your PC and then visit c:\XboxGames\Forza Motorsport\Content\Media\PCFamily\RenderScenerios folder in the Xbox version or c:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Forza Motorsport\Content\Media\PCFamily\RenderScenerios folder on Steam. Here you will find folders for each visual preset… along with a special “Visual Target” folder. And it is there that you will discover a large number of XML files for improving the visual quality of the game. Copy these XML files into the ‘Ultra’ folder, overwrite what’s there and you’re good to go.
But before we proceed, please note that this is an unofficial mod and you are enabling features that may not be complete, may cause visual artifacts, or may crash the game. Also, don’t expect your mods to work everywhere in all areas of the game: playback, cinematics, and car tours seem to lack tweaks for beam reflections, for example, but tweaks they are present in the game.
With the mod enabled, one of the first things I noticed was a general increase in the level of detail, draw distance, and even object density when the mod is enabled. Grass is mostly a flat texture, for example, but with the mod, thin planes of geometry are added that stretch into the distance. More detail and greater draw distance are present in many other aspects of the game: denser forests, more bushes, stands full of onlookers. All things considered, the game feels tighter, holds up better at distance with less pop-in. That alone could form the basis for an “extreme” visual preset in a shipping game – but there’s more.
Ray traced global lighting is also included. The feature was promised at some point before launch, and Turn 10 is keeping quiet about it, although the technology appears to be enabled in at least some of the company’s more recent marketing screenshots. RTGI tracks light from the sun and even emitting surfaces (such as LED panels) with precise scenes transforming color reflection.
RTGI’s excellent ambient and reflective lighting applies to all buildings and trackside details, no matter how mundane, elevating the game’s presentation. It takes areas that are usually too bright and uniformly lit, adds new dark areas that make physical sense, and grounds them in their surroundings. Of course, it’s not just the added shading, but the added reflective lighting that illuminates surfaces with the color of the surface the light is reflecting from is also important.
Overall, this is an excellent improvement – but the current implementation is not without its problems. Denoising generally works, but it feels unfinished, meaning there are instances where sparks of fireflies and other noisy artefacts are noticeable, so while RTGI greatly improves the quality of lighting on the track, there are scenarios where the image is less stable.
It’s not just about RTGI, though RT reflection quality has also improved significantly as the roughness limit has moved significantly. In principle, RT reflection performance can be increased by lowering this threshold, ensuring that the effect only applies to “shinier” surfaces. By increasing the crop, the effect is applied to duller or coarser materials. A good example of this can be found inside car cockpits, where subtle highlights are now applied to materials such as leather, nicely enhancing the realism of the interior. RTGI and enhanced reflections can be combined nicely in this scenario to turn the pitch black cockpit space into something much more revealing. However, it is here with noisy artifacts are very noticeable.
In general, the RT upgrades look great – but they’re not quite ready for the transport game. When it’s raining, reflections on the road don’t display correctly when the mod is on. Meanwhile, during night races, a lot of lights lose their shadows for unknown reasons, giving the game an overly scattered look. So, if you’re interested in trying out the mod, stick to day races with clear weather if you can.
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As you can imagine, the performance of all these improvements is significant – but the extent of the frame rate drop depends on the context. Using the RTX 3080 when looking outside the car, where the main difference is the RTGI and extended draw distance, there is a significant 27 percent performance drop. When tested in replay (where extended RT reflections are not present), this performance reduction in the chase cam view averaged about 16 percent. In general, we’d recommend having the camera at this distance, as the frame rate hits in the cockpit are high: we saw a 40 percent drop in one shot – bear in mind that full bounce coverage and RTGI combined can be quite expensive.
Apart from the mod, we had some issues with the PC version of Forza Motorsport at launch – mainly due to CPU performance that seemed too heavy and “spiky”. On a stock Ryzen 3600, we’d expect similar performance to the Xbox, but frame times were too high to reach a locked 60fps, while jumps to around 33ms could cause stuttering. When re-tested this week, there was a clear and welcome improvement: on average, there was a 15 percent improvement in frame rate while throttling the CPU. However, the gain will “feel” better because the frame time peaks are significantly reduced. There are also improvements on the GPU side, but when tested on the RTX 2070 Super there was only a four percent improvement – but it’s still nice. It was also nice to see that the game now gives you clear and visible warnings if your settings choices take you beyond your graphics card’s VRAM limits.
Overall, I’d say Forza Motorsport on PC hits a good point in terms of performance. As for the “visual target” mode, it’s obviously heavy on your GPU and has some visual issues, but I think it’s worth a look – but more to the point, there’s plenty of evidence that Turn 10 could bring a new “extreme”. Graphics preset: improved detail and render distance, improved RT reflections and RTGI would be great additions – provided the bugs and denoising issues can be improved – if not for today’s mainstream hardware, then tomorrow’s PC technology.