PC Ultimate Edition owners! How is the game?

I'm waiting on a bargain XBox One S I got from Tesco to arrive and thinking of upgrading my planned Horizons purchase to Ultimate and seeing if it runs on my PC as the weekend looms with my console likely to turn up early next week.

I have a venerable i5 2500K 3.3Ghz, 8GB ram and an NVIDIA 980 Ti with 6GB vram. Would be interested to hear how anyone else with a similar spec finds the game as I've heard it's a bit hit and miss with hardware if the web is to be believed.

Performance isn't great, but I'm sitting on minimum specs with a overclocked 3500k, 32gb ram and SLI GTX 670 2GBs. SLI is not supported and I have fairly constant low video memory warnings. I've also had quite a few CTDs, which I think are VRAM related. I'm running everything at minimum except AF at 8X and FXAA at 1920x1080. I get between 27-37fps in the world so its playable, but if SLI was supported the performance would definitely be much more acceptable. Also, strangely very low and sluggish FPS in the garage/upgrade/visual upgrade section.

As far as port wise, it's probably fine and your rig with the 980Ti would probably run it at a pretty decent FPS.

I'm running it on a i5 3570 with 16GB on a Nvidia 770 and it seems to run fine with AA, motion blur and V-Sync off. I also noticed it seems to run a bit smoother when in cockpit view.

Hmm, thanks guys. Very tempted but I worry about my lopsided system and it's weak memory and CPU. Decisions decisions!

Something is up with the game on PC. But you're probably at the point of brute-force pushing over the lack of GPU utilisation so the only real question is that CPU. But if you're planning to play on XB1 then you're ok with 30fps. I expect you should be able to hit 1440p (maybe more?) Ultra without even a hint of issues holding a perfect 30fps if you cap it to that. That way the CPU has a lighter load than trying to hold the GPU to 60fps (which it seems less than great at).

Some people found the driver update has fixed their perf woes, I'm not that lucky but have found that going into task manager and setting the process priority to Low does remove the stuttering issues I've had [this is also a known workaround for stutter issues on Apex so it's not that weird it works, although I don't have stutter issues with Apex so... that's a bit weird].

I'm running 1440p with a mix of High and Ultra settings to get a locked 60fps from the game with a few slight dips in spots but nothing like the stuttering mess it was like the first time I ran it. i5-2500K (but at 4.5GHz OC) with a GTX1070 OC. So I'm not a million miles from your system (Pascal vs Maxwell but 980Ti and 1070 aren't that far apart, same CPU but I've got an OC on there). I'm running those (high to max) setting because there's no point running lower ones. 1080p Medium still gives the same almost perfect 60fps with the occasional drops so they're not GPU related (in fact, the game regularly isn't close to 100% GPU utilisation and most of the stalls seem to be due to some bad scheduling of the asset streaming system - the vehicle upgrades menu is a joke of a UI with hundreds of ms of stalls when going between items due to micro-loads in the UI, for a game running on several threads there is no excuse for such a bad implementation that makes me think it's a bug that will be fixed).

Oh, and if you buy the Ultimate version you'll likely not be able to get the VIP bonus (coin doubler) or launch DLC packs that come included until your XB1S arrives because the Windows Store is a garbage fire and thousands of people who paid for the Ultimate version are unable to access those perks as the DRM is broken somehow (Turn 10 community management is aware of the issue and working on a fix).

It's a lot like many of the UWP games that come out: the performance should be higher (this does not help advertise DX12 as the future); the bugs seem like unforced errors; we expect most of it to be fixed. But I'm not sure this first weekend of Ultimate-only access is showing the best the game has to offer to the people who paid the most to play it. Oh, and playing it earlier today I was getting time-out from the servers trying to do anything that connects online (auctions, leaderboards, uploading photos/tunes) so if they're having issues with load now, I can't imagine anything will work when the actual release date comes around and everyone is playing it.

@shivoa: Yeah I was reading it seems to favour one core and ignore others, putting undue load on the CPU, and some finding the controls at 30fps on PC more laggy than Xbox, so all a bit iffy.

Still, I figured being a mental completionist I wanted the ultimate edition anyway so bought it just now. Even if I don't / can't play on PC this weekend it's worth while having it there as I suspect my Xbox will turn up Monday and I have the week off :)

Hey, what was I going to spend the extra money on anyway? Food? Pah! I will survive on strong tea :)

@scribble: You have a K processor, add 10% Vcore and you're nearly guaranteed a 4.2ghz overclock. A little tweaking and you should be able to hit 4.4-4.5ghz easy, which would balance out your system pretty easily.

@mwmorph: Yeah, I bought this CPU an age ago after reading it was an easy OC and somehow never got round to it. Perhaps this is the weekend that happens!

I can't remember what my BIOS tweak was (it was a very mild over-Volt, not even 10%) but CPUz is showing a 1.416 core Voltage right now in Windows (for a stable 4.5GHz), using a CM Hyper 212 EVO to keep it cool and quiet. I think I ran 4.2GHz for a while with no over-Volt at all, possible even back with the stock cooler for a bit. So if you're up for it (and have a motherboard that matches the K to enable overclocking) then it wouldn't be a terrible idea.

Like I say, you can basically get to stable 60fps with it and a few small caveats. And some people saw just the new driver totally fix it, not sure why others of us had to poke at thread priority to get there. It's a great game and does look pretty amazing (other than the aliasing - MSAA is great for rocks and cars but terrible for foliage and the FXAA doesn't help with dense foliage so it's got the same issue as Rise of the Tomb Raider: thick tree cover with random pixels of sky flickering through it looking more like someone added a white sprinkle of dead (on) pixels to the scene than what it intends to render) so it's worth giving it a go and seeing if you're lucky and if your system can cope.

I am sitting at 80 fps plus on ultra at 1440p with a 980TI, an i7 6700k and 16GB of RAM

The game looks seriously so good on pc. I'm so happy I can take advantage of my system on this game

@shivoa: Thanks, good stuff to know. It's been years since I built this PC but IIRC it was to a guide that matched the motherboard to this CPU specifically to future proof it via overclocking so I figure it's good, but I need to take a closer look as I've not thought about it since then, just upgraded the graphics card a few times.

I'll post back here with my results if I get round to it over the weekend. Who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and it all runs smooth? :)

@scribble: Ye, this is certainly not everyone who is finding the game is iffy (except for the upgrade menu for cars - I think that's busted for everyone as a stalling mess).

And some reviewers noted they got the stuttering when it first became available for review (day before Ultimate release) but the official GameReady driver fixed it for them. So there's definitely a good chance your system is going to be running it very nicely with that high end GPU.

Running well on a 4690k and 1070. Everything on high or ultra at 1440p, rarely dipping down to 50fps. Staying between 60 and 70 normally.

VIP rewards are currently broken on PC. They're aware of the issue and working on it, so don't waste your wheel spins (if you level up after a race it forces a spin, but any level-ups outside of a race you can hold on to). I just logged in on XB1 to redeem my VIP stuff and will see if it works as intended on PC now. Reinstalling the game (the whole 49GB download) to see how it runs on an SSD. There's some lag when scrolling through car parts and the initial load is kind of long. Hoping running it on SSD solves that. Might turn my overclocks back on (CPU to 4.4GHz, GPU to 2100MHz) to see if it's enough to push me to Ultra at a steady 60fps. Apex hated my overclocks, so not not expecting much. Game runs great, just trying to squeeze a little more out.

I only have a 970 and 8gb of ram and an i5 and it's honestly been really good for me

I had one instance of a circuit race in the city where the frame rate dove south real bad, but other than that it's been real smooth. I'm locked at 30 tho for what it's worth

I only played a few minutes on PC to see how framey it was for me and it was just annoying enough that Im gonna stick to the xbone version for now.

I haven't played it yet, I'm waiting for the release on Tuesday. I'm curious how it runs on a machine similar to mine. I have an I7 4770K at 3.50 HZ, a GTX 970 (overclocked) and 12 gis of RAM. I also have an SSD if that matters. Posters before me had similar set ups but overclocked or higher grade CPU's. Since it appears this game is a bit of a CPU hog I wonder if mine is up to snuff enough to hit a consistent 60 at 1080p on ultra or close to it.

Currently the issue seems to be optimization. I've tried the lowest graphics settings to the highest, and the game suffers from frame drops and stuttering regardless.

Areas with lots of buildings seem to cause this, as Surfers Paradise is particularly bad. The game runs solid out in the open like the Outback, and looks stunning when it does run as it's supposed to.

I went to buy Forza Horizon 3 and realized you can only get it on PC now if you get the ultimate edition which costs £80!!!! Why isn't this getting more press attention? I mean I know I don't have to buy it now and can certainly wait until the 27th for the standard edition but we know the game is ready to play on PC, this is a clear case of Microsoft charging more because they know people who are desperate to play the game will pay for it and that's kind of really shitty?

I have a 970, 16 GB Ram, and an i5 6600k and I get 60 fps on high and 1080p.

@sushix:Same. I was messing with settings all day. On med, high, ultra, v-sync on and off I was experiencing random frame drops. They were almost non-existent if I forced 30 fps, but fuck that I'm playing on PC because I want 60+. In addition to being bad in the city, I noticed it was also bad in offroad races when behind a handful of AI cars.

You must be new here. They've been doing that with Forza for years now. The $100 version gets you VIP, the season pass, and probably more (I forget). The fact that the game unlocks early is just icing on the cake. They're not charging more ONLY for unlocking it a few days early.

Yeah I get that but it still feels kinda carnie to me

That's a good question, and if I can ever get past the playground games logo without the game crashing straight to desktop... Yeah... sigh.

@keirgo: Did you trying disabling you mic? I heard that might work in some cases for immediate crashing.

Hmm, I'll try that when I get home, sounds strange that it could be that though.

Was looking forward to this but I can't install anything from the Windows Store, get an error message every time. Updated to the latest version of Windows and everything. Ah well.

How's the wheel support? Forza Horizon 3 might be that cool game for me where it's arcade and relax but still has cockpit view and wheel support. But the FFB in Apex was not exactly great sadly.

Edit: Jeez. watching the quick look and the framerate looks rough. I know it's an open world game versus a circuit racer, but Forza Apex runs at 100+fps on everything max on a Fury which should be a slower card than a GTX1080. Maybe it's their slower CPU and maybe lower amount of RAM (8GB vs 16GB)? Edit2: oh dynamic stuff is on too, that probably tanks the framerate too at times.

My performance has been actually really solid on Ultra (980Ti, 4770k) but I've been getting crashes. Anyone else? It seems like it happens a few minutes after I've hit the server - design store, leaderboards, etc.

My other complaint is the store implementation is pretty garbagey. The Windows 10 UI just sort of pops up over the game, and seems to require mouse and keyboard input instead of being usable with the Xbox pad I'm already using.

All that being said, the game looks great and is super fun.

Anyone here running it on an AMD card?

Main issue with wheel support is that the game does not seem to support multiple devices, I have wheel and pedals connected using separate USBs and cannot get one to work without disconnecting the other. Oddly enough, disconnecting the Xbox gamepad makes no difference and it seems to work at all times.

@shivoa: I'll have to try setting priority to low, because performance was relatively okay for me (same cpu @ 4.4, 970) minus a few drops in certain situations. Just to check if that helps. Still will wait for a patch to get fully back in (due to the menu lag), so I'll stick with the xbox version for now.

Inexplicably the game started working for me, and I hadn't tried anything. I got home, booted up my PC and decided to just launch it, not expecting anything different to happen, but to my surprise it started up fine. Very puzzling, though I'm not complaining.

I have to echo, this game is simply gorgeous, and is running quite well on my machine. I'm getting solid 60-70 fps with a few dips down to ~50 when a lot of cars are on screen, running at ultra settings with shadows set to high and msaa x4, at 1440p on an i5 6600k @ 4.4Ghz, 16GB RAM, 980ti SLI, though no SLI profile yet.

I feel like performance varies greatly from PC to PC. I also have an i5 2500k OC to 4,5 GHz, a gtx 970 and 8GB RAM, and I struggle to run the game at a smooth 30 fps on medium with some settings even set to low (shadows for example). Mostly I get some super noticable slowdowns every now and then and maybe even a few freezes here and there.

I have an i7 4770, 16GB Ram and a GTX950 (2GB VRAM) The auto settings suggested medium graphics much to my surprise. It seems to run fine but get around 30-40fps most of the time while driving.

My main problem is though, I keep getting a popup saying that my video memory is low and cant turn it off. I have lowered my settings and the game still looks nice with the occasional popup and getting 60 fps most of the time. Occasionally getting pauses just before an impact with something.

Still having an issue in the car tuning/upgrade section though. Everytime I switch to a new mod there is a 2 second pause which is very annoying. And as for custom paint jobs etc the problem is worse.

The menu system seems more taxing than the actual gameplay.

All in all though, given the amount of detail in the game, I am somewhat happy with what I have to work with at the moment. Just not sure if I should add another GTX950 (and hope SLI support becomes a thing) Or just upgrade my GPU again.

Anyone know of a way to disable the Low Video Memory warning?

So I just reinstalled the newest Nvidia driver and that seems to have solved all my problems. Now running the game at high settings with stable 60 fps.

Constant crashing for me so far, and haven't determined a specific cause. event viewer shows id 1000 which says it's a dns/client connection issue. the details aren't really telling though. i initially thought i fixed it by redeeming some car codes on xbox.com, but that didn't do it apparently. also performance is kinda cruddy for me given i have a gtx 1080 (possibly held back by an fx 8350 but how goddamn much?). when i CAN run it high/ultra at 1440p i have to lock it at 30fps and it can't maintain that all the time (poor me, i know).

gonna wipe the drivers and reinstall, maybe?

Hi all - I'm running i5 4460, 16GB ram, GTX 970.

I've noticed basically zero issues apart from some mild audio tearing here and there when Anna pipes up to tell me to turn around. Otherwise, the game runs at around 50-65 fps on all ultra settings at 1080p, solid 30fps on all ultra settings at 1440p, but only around 22-24 fps if I boost it up to 4k on ultra. I'm still going back and forth between playing at 1440p/30 and 1080p/60 right now trying to figure out which one I prefer. Personally I'm leaning towards 1440p/30 as the depth of colour looks better to me.

Also apparently there's some crazy background DRM with this game that might be costing a lot of CPU. I'm hoping they patch the game to better optimize this, then maybe my dream of 4k/30fps for FH3 could be a reality.

Its a bit messy with weird issues here and there.

Even though i got an framerate avarage well above 60fps i still get dips down to single digits and pure stutter sometimes and it doesnt seem to be connected to anything i do. I also had to deny the "Forza Horizon 3 windows app" access to my microphone for it to start at all, it was just crashing at start up at default.

Yeah performance is rough. I'm running an i5 4790k and a 970. I could get 60 FPS... somewhat consistently on high settings while driving around the open world, only a few drops here and there. But during events and city driving drop it down to the 30-45 range. Seemingly randomly too. It's weird though cause even when I dropped everything down to the lowest settings I was getting the same problem.

I've ended up switching over to the Xbox version for now which kinda bums me out, cause when this game is running 60FPS, hoooooo boy does it look and play real nice. Unfortunately as much as I like the high frame rate I'd rather have a consistent 30 than a spotty 60. Thankfully the One version still looks super nice.

Performance is all over the place for me. At fist I had trouble getting the game to start at all. Since, I've experienced a whole host of weird performance issues. Sometimes I can get the game to run at a locked 30fps in Ultra with no issues. Sometimes I get sub 20fps performance even in the menus unless I run the game in a window. And a lot of crashes and stuttering on top of it all. Luckily I've not had the issues with VIP or DLC stuff that some people have mentioned.

Specs:
i7-2600K
GTX 1060 (6 GB)
16 GB of ram

So this just started working for me (I didn't do anything, I just started the game today and I had the crown icon and the coin doubler for the XP rolls was active - glad I saved up most of my roll, even if I got little other than credits with my rolls so far). Officially resolved as of 2 hours ago so everyone should be a VIP now.

No game patch so this was a server-side/WinStore issue.

So the best settings I could get got me and fps that fluctuated between 50-60fps quite often and sometimes would go all the way down to 40. I guess I seem to still be one of the lucky ones in that I can get a locked in 30fps rather easily on High dynamic settings. It definitely proves the point to me that consistent fps beats more fps.

Until last night the game had been running pretty much flawless for me with everything on Ultra other than that shitty menu stutter which has been an issue in the last four Forza games. Yesterday afternoon I decided to give Groove's ability to stream music from Microsoft's Onedrive a go and started an upload of a sizable chunk of my music. After starting the upload I booted up FH3 again and while the frame counter read 80fps the micro stuttering that was occuring made the game nearly unplayable. I'm not sure if the stuttering was do to my usable bandwidth being maxed or if it was just an unfortunate coincidence.

So that thing we've all absorbed from discussions of this game is that it's CPU-bound a lot of the time and that's causing all sorts of issues (even if you've got a 4.5GHz desktop-class quad-core Intel to throw at it). I just wanted to share a bit of added data into that pool: it possibly only cares about one core and the rest are barely fed.

Here's my system after playing over the long weekend:

So I've played for almost 19 hours (this is good going, loads to do and plenty of idle time to enjoy too - I'm nowhere near even finishing the first chapter of the game and the original Horizon, I'd almost finished the entire campaign and a decent chunk of multiplayer at the 20 hour mark) and it has consumed a bit over 27 hours of CPU time. This is on a 4-core desktop so that's not a failure of the system bur rather the ideal app that gave up no time and dedicated the system to itself would be able to use CPU time 4 times faster than the clock ticks. Of course, you've gotta give time to the OS (and the driver - can't forget that is also going to be counted as non-app CPU time).

But this works out to being about 1.5x average core consumption. But that might just be how games are, we can't point at that in isolation and say DX12 is a failure and this engine only really cares about 1 fast core just like all the old bad engines that DX12 was meant to save us from (and keep our ever-increasing TFLOPS of GPU perf fed with stuff to do).

Luckily, I've also been playing The Crew (Wild Run engine version) recently so this is another open world driving game to poke at and ask for stats. I've played for 23 hours in the last month (which is actually a complete solo playthrough of the entire main story and enough side-stuff to keep levelling up those cars - another ~20 hour game that Horizon 3 is already zooming past) for which I've got CPU time data. That value is 57 hours. About 2.5x average core consumption.

Ye, that comparison does not look great for Forza Horizon but I guess we can see why it's getting stalled out by all but the very fastest, newest CPUs! Nothing definitive here but it's certainly not a glowing first impression for DX12 from a game coming out of MS.

Has anyone tried to play this over Steam in-home streaming, particularly to Steam Link? I tested Forza Apex with some instructions I found (below), but the audio is real choppy and the framerate isn't what it should be. Hoping someone has some tips. I also sadly couldn't use my Dualshock 4 because of how Steam emulates the controller. I was able to use an Xbox 360 controller if I connected it with VirtualHere (USB-over-ethernet).

Here's the weird batch file hack you have to do in order to get a fake "exe" you can add to Steam. I actually like Win10 but holy shit, this is some next-level bullshit right here.

So having pushed my i5-2500K CPU to 4.8GHz, the improvement isn't staggering (not like I jumped 20fps) but it's enough to really iron out at least half the perf drops (and generally push the game safely over 60fps in 1440p all-Ultra) and make sure when they do strike, it's more like a slight dip to 50fps and rapid recovery.

I'll say this much: I got a bigger jump in FPS from OCing 4.5GHz to 4.8GHz on the CPU than in moving from 4xMSAA to 0xMSAA without changing anything else or from moving from Ultra to High settings. That's not exactly what I expect out of most games. And the somewhat annoying thing about this: I have no expectation that the single-threaded perf of my gaming system will improve that much with the next upgrade. Intel don't sell consumer chips that overclock this much with ease on a dusty $20 cooler (the base clocks have gone up a bit, the headroom for OCing has gone down) and the great hope from AMD is a chip with 16 hardware threads but none of them are expected to be much faster than current Intel cores (that's possibly even the best case scenario: AMD selling a chip with double the core count and not haing a lower single-core perf level to do it when the chip isn't fully loaded) so a game engine like this may not find any advantage from that upgrade.

I'm having major issues on my 1070. It's unplayable, stuttering so much I can't get past the main menu.

Lucky I have an Xbone, hope this gets patched so I can enjoy the PC version too.

Runs great with very minor stuttering issues when discovering new stuff on 1070 and i7 6700k.

A bit off topic:

I want to purchase the game off the Microsoft store on windows 10 but it is unreasonably expensive because of my region (about 80$).

Does anyone know what happens if i switch my region to the US and purchase it for 60$ would i be able to play it without any issues?

Would love some help if anyone knows how this works!

@shivoa: Yeah, I've been seeing similar behaviour with a 4670K @ 4.2 GHz and a GTX 1080 — one core hovers between 95 and 100% utilisation while the others sit around 50-60%. It's not too disruptive for me because the GPU is usually above 90% utilisation at the same time, but there are enough periodic frame rate drops caused by that one core spiking to 100% to have an affect on playability. I ended up jacking everything up and capping the framerate at 48Hz which has worked out great so far.

Gosh, my GTX 770 is feeling awfully old these days. Just fired up the PC version and I can run the game on medium without too much trouble, but it looks and feels better on my Xbox.