The game is a lot of fun but the FPS drops are real and really annoying. Night races are a treat for the eyes since the frame rate is constant. On the other hand surfer's paradise during the day causes some serious fps drops. Running on ultra 1080p with a GTX 1070, 5820k and 32gb of ram.

Technical issues aside it's an incredible game. Just driving around straya feels incredible. The sound is great and the car selection is one of the best i've ever seen.

The Koenigsegg One:1 is a MONSTER

For some reason my brand new PC isn't 100% compatible with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and blue screens all the time when it's installed... so I'll let you know when I can.

As for playing it on the XB1, it's pretty awesome.

My 6700k and GTX 1080 runs it on Ultra at 1080p at a flat 60fps, though I do get some weird stutter here and there, not as frequently as other seem to be experiencing it though. Tends to be when transitioning between areas.

@grayfoxbr: Do you have the nVidia drivers for the game? I saw in a few places that fixed pretty much all the stuttering and hitching and framerate drops. Still waiting on picking up the game even though I could just play on my Xbox until the PC version is eventually sorted out.

@opusofthemagnum: Yes, I'm running the game ready drivers(372.90). On the last Forza Twitch stream the developers stated that a performance patch is being made so those issues will be sorted out.(we hope)

They definitely did not. The game is a mess right now.

@mike: @grayfoxbr: Thanks for the heads up gentlemen. Probably would have impulse purchased tomorrow otherwise, knowing myself.
Fingers crossed the PC version gets to be as awesome as it should be.

That is an... optimistic view of the driver update that circulated after some press people (who had access to the PC version briefly before the driver patches were out) found that their very stuttering copy of the game got much better with the new drivers. Even doing a completely clean install of the drivers (total wipe of previous ones) only fixes stuttering for me when I also set the executable's priority to Low. I'm also fixing generally unsatisfactory (and CPU-bound - doesn't get better when dropping visual settings) perf levels via OCing my CPU as far as I can due to only one of the cores being heavily taxed by the game (so much for DX12).

Lots of people are still waiting for an official patch to the game as there seems something wrong there and I'm not convinced another driver update can work around it. The upgrade menu alone indicates there is rotten code at least in part of this product that should not have shipped.

@shivoa: its not a dx12 game.

@rethla: Where did you get that impression from?

Word of God:

This time around, we’ve taken the Horizon Festival to Australia, which has allowed us to create the largest, most diverse, beautiful, and fun open world we’ve ever built – twice the size of Forza Horizon 2 – all powered by DirectX 12 and the latest version of ForzaTech.

Stuttering and poor performance has been the issue in most other DX12 titles with Nvidia cards, so that's not completely unexpected.

It's not an issue just for nVidia cards in this game and that's also not true.

AMD have bad DX11 drivers, nVidia have a huge software team that tweak their drivers more to optimise each game. I mean, AMD had to build Mantle to give them a chance while nVidia just kept optimising their DX11 code and leading talks about how to use OpenGL to build an almost zero-overhead engine to get past the issues with increasing draw call counts (while already having a DX11 driver that could more than double the draw count of AMD within the same time window). Team Green also have a few tricks (their cards are tile-based rasterisers, which sure is something that was hidden for a while but now is out in the open) but this stuff all adds up to cards that use less Watts to render the same framerate in DX11 games while having lower theoretical shader perf (TFLOPS) that should be the limiting factor in the workload.

Then DX12 arrived and that issue with DX11 drivers for AMD went away (also a new focus on matching nVidia with a new driver came along, plus everyone who does console optimisation is optimising for GCN GPUs now). The devs got more control and didn't need to lean on the driver optimisations for pushing the limits of what "classic" DX was capable of doing. This means AMD have bounced up but only to closer to where their cards should have been in the first place. The RX 480 (5.16 TFLOPS) should be crushing it against a GTX1060 6GB (4.37 TFLOPS) and with a few new engines and DX12 tests, that's not completely inconceivable. Somewhere between design differences, driver optimisations, and various different very clever ideas, the theoretical numbers for AMD don't translate to nVidia-beating results... even for DX12.

But they are definitely currently more competitive than they have been for years and DX12 has helped them get there. But that's not a knock against nVidia's DX12 implementation. They just had far less loss from using DX11 so there was far less to be gained by moving to DX12 or even the new DX11 engines (eg Snowdrop) that seem better placed to work round the limitations.

Yea, there's something wrong with the game it seems. Looking at Digital Foundry's videos and some other benchmarks, it seems that certain settings really tank the framerate, especially on non-Polaris/Pascal cards and the CPU usage is odd. Weird when Apex seems to run more than fine on the same hardware (at least it's using more than one core here, around 5ish threads on max on an i7 4790K). Perhaps they fucked up with the open world somehow.

Don't buy this thing on PC it's a trash fire the game keeps crashing to my desktop after a loading screen (yes i Uninstalled Avast anit virus! )

Had to turn off a ghost mic in my sound settings seems to work now ....

Now it Randomly Crashes every 10 minutes ...

@gundogan: Ye, some interesting results there.

I wish they'd spent more time looking into the current gen cards as they clearly say that on 1080p 0xMSAA Ultra the 1060 drops frames so can't hold to 60fps while the Pascal Titan X can do 4K at those settings without a dropped frame in that starting race. And yet they later go on to say MSAA is a critical setting to turn off (despite being something the game can manage just fine on XB1, if at 30fps - something the PC can match when you also cap to 30) but I'm looking at barely a difference on my system for that switch (on a 1070) and also think that the way they run everything with v-sync means they don't really get into how much of a difference that edit makes (a stable 60-70 fps looks perfect, a stable 55-65fps will be one that regularly drops frames but those two things are 5fps different - marginal gap that just shows you need to find the perf somewhere, not that MSAA is a big win).

Good to see some reporting on the AMD side and the stuttering from asset loading being captured there (on the current gen card) and general low perf on the other high-end AMD. Always somewhat easy to flag something as "an issue with manufacturer X" (especially when ~70% of gaming systems [take last few years of sales of dedicated GPUs or just Steam hw survey minus the Intel block to see that ratio] are running Team Green so reports will skew somewhat even if systems were completely equally affected).

Something is very weird with this engine and the issues with last gen cards is really not encouraging. And I can't even say that I assume it's a generational thing: maybe that's just that their tests systems with those cards exhibit a perf bug and the Titan/480/1060 systems didn't. Maybe the chance of running into the perf bug is much higher on those types of systems but it does cut across generations for others.

I know I can get to 1440p60 with 4xMSAA Ultra on a 1070 but how that's achieved on my system seems almost entirely about OCing my CPU as fast as possible (plus setting the process priority down) and not at all about the GPU. In fact 1080p 0xMSAA High still has those occasional drops from 60fps which is crazy when you think how much less load that is on the GPU.

Hopefully the first patch will arrive pretty soon and have some major perf wins for a range of systems. Maybe DF can return in a month and show how the final game runs on a range of systems.

Got the game running super smooth! So goooooood.

I would like to thank this game for reminding me the fun of dialing in an overclock that's only just stable (going exactly as fast as you can and no faster).

It's been so long since I thought I really needed to actually get to 100% of the potential of my CPU (over 5 years of an i5-2500K that just overclocks up to "fast enough" without even really touching voltages and only really demanding better than stock cooling for the quieter experience of a $20 tower HSF). Hitting 5GHz flat (I guess I did pretty well at the silicon lottery, I'd just never needed to test that - helps to not need to have a stable OC with SuperPi loading all cores as I only really care about stability with Horizon's particular CPU load) and I can now say that I'm 60fps locked at 1440p Ultra (inc 4xMSAA) or can drive up into the 70-100fps zone for outside the major urban areas if I turn off v-sync (but now I can hit 60 then I'm going back to v-sync on).

To talk about the game itself, I got my first Horizon Edition (XP boosted variant) with a 2013 Subaru BRZ yesterday. I grabbed it, took it for a spin, and thought about auctioning it for the million credits a HE model currently seems to be going for (not that they're particularly rare it would seem to win one in a spin but rare enough and the auction house removes the price limits for HE models). I enjoyed the BRZ when I went back to Horizon 1 recently but this was all wrong (for me). Looked at the tune, couldn't tame it to my liking. Then I went and tripped out the engine swap and rebuild the upgrades to where I actually wanted it to be. It's now absolutely lovely: can hold a sideways drift forever with gentle steering corrections and can launch off the line with a perfect gear progression that's just where I want it (as someone who plays manual+clutch).

So remember, just because some of these cars come with a body kit and a tune with upgraded parts, doesn't mean you can't strip them back down (remember to go into tune manager and reset the tune to defaults so you're tweaking from the original initial setup) and find something truly great with your own build. And you keep the Horizon Edition boost.

Okay so, do cars/the physics in this game just feel like shit or is there something going on causing some latency with my PC setup here? Steering feels unbearably sluggish, giving me the feeling that I'm never in control of where I'm going (not in a fun way). I'm constantly turning too much and then overcompensating my corrections of those turns because the steering seems so delayed, which all is really not fun at all. I'm using a PS4 controller with DS4Windows, so I guess that could theoretically be an issue, though it's not with any other games.

Regardless, there's something obviously fucked with this game when even with the driver update, it runs at 70-80 FPS with some drops below 60 on medium settings at 720p, using a computer with a 1080 and 6700k.

Getting it for PC having sold my Xbox One last year despite my love of the Forza games. Hopefully my GTX 1070 should make it look pretty decent. Hearing nothing but great things about the game.

So happy Microsoft are releasing these on PC now, just hope this continues with the next Forza game. Forza 6 was a blast on Xbox One.

GameGPU's benchmarks seem to show roughly the same results:

All fine here... sort of. Lets try max settings.

NOPE!

@yummytreesap: Something is not right for you my friend. Im playing with an Xbox one controller on PC and it feels more responsive than Horizon 2 on the console.

Have you checked the ingame driver settings?

This ended up being a monitor webcam for me. I unplugged the USB cable running to the monitor and it installed perfectly.

Pleasantly surprised at performance so far, after reading this thread. Running a 980ti/4670k@4.2/16GB RAM/SSD and getting a locked 60 on Ultra (2x MSAA) at 1080p most of the time.

There's noticeable hitching, but the lowest I've seen it go to is high 40s so far.

Given that I've run into three games recently that I've been having hitching problems due to CPU load (on my perfectly good 3.4 ghz i5) I'm considering exploring overclocking. It doesn't feel like it should be that hard for an Xbox One game to stay under my CPU cap.

@dewar: I don't have a webcam. I just purchased a Dell Alienware Aurora R5 and the only things I have connected to it are a 1440 Dell 27" Monitor and an Xbox 360 wired controller.

@yummytreesap: I find the steering kind of swimmy as well, I chalk it up to not being that accustomed to more sim style racing games. I turned on some extra assists to help me get used to it and am doing a lot better. I just tried the xbone version and it feels the same as the PC.

@yummytreesap: Sounds like you have larger problems than this, but I thought I'd point out that the Standard steering mode in Horizon does provide some steering assists, so maybe try simulation and see if it feels any better?

Also of note: Simulation steering is more aimed at people using the precision of a wheel so while it does remove the averaging (which necessarily creates slight lag) you aren't expected to find it really easy with a joypad. I suspect they've tuned it back somewhat in Horizon vs Motorsport but that's always been one of those settings I tread around real carefully (the last assist I'll rarely play with it off in Motorsport - takes a real stable class/tune on a car for me to demand the responsiveness of Simulation steering).

Haha, I remember the first time I took control of a Forza car: the Lamborghini in the opening sequence of Forza Horizon 2. They just handed me this graceful car in full flight along these beautiful southern European cliffside roads, with the disembodied voice of the host dude talking up this amazing car holiday we're about to go on and party music blaring in the background, and I proceeded to swerve out of control and ram it into the barrier on the side of the road almost immediately.

Er, I'm good at Forza now, I swear.

Well i'm now getting a weird issue where, even though i have the game set to lock to 30fps, the frame rate is still unlocked, (as confirmed by the in game fps counter) and i can't lock it again, also i can only pick either 30 or unlocked in the menu, where before i had more options.

I guess reinstall number 3 is on the cards, it's a shame as the game is actually really good.

Learned really quickly that frame rate smoothing really isn't optional, without the pacing option enable the game stammers around like crazy.

Right now I'm getting 58-80 range in FPS with everything maxed at 1440p except with MSAA turned off and no V-sync. I do notice occasional slight drops that immediately bounce back and in dense environments the FPS goes to mid 50's. It seems like the game has trouble streaming the environment from time to time when considerable hitching occurs but that's about it for performance troubles.

Running with an i7 4770k/GTX 1080.

I notice some crazy stuttering on moving objects such as cars during cutscenes does the frame rate smoothing solve that issue because I just now turned it back on?

@colourful_hippie: Yeah seems to help with the erratic delivery of the frames, everything seems to jump around oddly without it.

@shivoa: Oh well i made the mistake (again) of taking the windowsstore as something you can trust.

It clearly said "DirectX level 11" or something like that when i bought and downloaded the game. Maybe they have changed it by now, probably not.

The input lag on pc with 30fps is horrible .

Could some kind soul help me with the problem I have using nvidia Inspector on horizon 3

. I keep getting the message- you do not have permission to open forza_x64_release_final.exe in nvidia inspector.

I tried moving inspector to C , opening it as administrator , changing the permissions inside the forza 3 folder to full control for everything .

I have it installed on another drive beside C: , i don't know if this might be the issue?

I really would appreciate some kind of help.

@korwin: I'm finding the opposite.

PC games!

@liam89: Isn't that one the limitations of the Windows store, that you can't modify any of the files for a given app?

@keirgo: A lot of people have been able to get nvidia inspector to work with FH3 - i seem to be having problems though.

I just came home so i could check it on my PC and yep it still says clear as day "DirectX 11" in the Windows store. Great stuff these Microsoftports...

I really dont care if its DX 11 or 12 but the hickups are a bit questionable.

@rethla: Ah, I think I've worked out where the crossed wire is.

Requirements for your GPU are "DirectX Feature Level 11".

This is slightly messy but basically it's giving the GPU minimum features as a DirectX level. They did this for DX9-level GPUs onward (when DX11 came out, this was how they listed all GPUs by feature level) with differing minimum required features for DX and premium (optional) features. But DX12 (the API that is giving this ability to more directly talk to the GPU with less driver in the middle and, crucially, allow several threads to all talk to the API and submit work without it all going horribly wrong) is the API the game uses. So it's a DX12 game that requires your GPU supports all of the hardware features of DX11.

Ye, this was not the cleanest way of them specifying what hardware you need.

Sigh, my ancient rig just won't cut it for this game I'm sure. I'm running an AMD Phenom X4 (3 cores open) @ 3.4 Ghz, an R9 270X GPU with 4 GB VRAM, and 6 GB of RAM. As someone who is on social security - my monthly income is severely limited obviously and I just can't afford any upgrades which I know I need badly. I don't even think I'd bother buying this to try it out in fact. I tried Apex out and while it does load now (previously it wouldn't even load to the company logo) it won't actually finish loading and get into the game proper.

And this makes me super depressed (even more than I normally am depressed, which is a lot) because I really, really want to support this Xbox/PC anywhere thingy MS is doing, and Horizon is right up my alley as a fan of racing games in general. Ph well, maybe I'll get lucky and someone will deliver an Alienware PC to me by mistake and then Alienware will be like, ok keep it man its all good!

:(

Here are some videos before I started tweaking the OC on my CPU and after. I think the lack of visible and unpredictable drops on the latter make a good case for this working (which I can confirm from extensive play, this has basically cured the issue and means I don't have to drop to 30fps until they patch in a fix - so far no updates have come in through the WinStore in the first week of release). It's 1440p Ultra (High shadows) 4xMSAA but only because it can go that high without making any difference. Even the the before video has been recorded with 1080p Medium settings the drops in framerate would have been just the same. Low quality YouTube compression makes it harder to notice the smaller stutters at the start of the first video with are also distracting during play but often didn't even get the fps counter to blip below 60. Really glad that the OC got the fps high enough that I could enable v-sync and just lock it to 60.

Forza with my i5-2500K @4.5GHz:

Forza with my i5-2500K @5GHz:

Cameo for some of the [BOMB] crew with the leaderboard scroll at the end.

Love it so far, but my 780ti is running like crap.... really thinking about upgrading to a 1070... This game hates Kepler.

Even with my 1080, I dip below 60 and the hitching drives me mad. Something is definitely borked.

Considering how this game is very CPU intensive, should I even bother since I have an AMD FX-6300?

Here's the thing: the game's not a dud. It's not a Batman: Get a Refund Knight situation where it's just hosed. If you've seen the XB1 footage and think that's pretty ok then you're sorted. 30fps cap, play with whatever settings your GPU can handle and let the 4.1GHz Turbo of your CPU give you as much as it can.

Various GPU settings but showing that that CPU can at least hold an always-over-30 as long as the middling GPU isn't also being loaded hard and often pushes up to 60 if you set the GPU settings low enough (but clearly you can see the drops into the 40s that, even on Low, are a sign it's not something the CPU can hold 60fps on). [4.4GHz OC]

Again, when not GPU-limited then the CPU is showing perf generally in the 40s that should look ok if you apply that 30fps cap (as Digital Foundry note, the framerate of the 30fps lock is basically perfect with no frame pacing issues causing stutter). Depending on your GPU you may be able to push the visual settings quite high but the CPU means you'll probably have the best experience if you keep the 30fps cap that comes switched on by default. Sometimes you'll get 60fps but a lot of time you won't and the way the stutters/frame pacing can happen when not at a locked fps in this game make it feel much worse than normal (the second video may be 40fps but the judder is bad enough I'd believe it if you told me the fps counter was broken and it was really 20fps in spots).

Been fiddling around with the game too. I was going to wait, but if certain retailers are gonna throw the game at me with price errors, sure. i7 4790K, 16GB RAM with a R9 Fury on 1920x1080@144Hz.

- Locking the framerate at 36 or 48 gives me pretty much hitchfree gameplay. Unlocked is welcome to Hitch City unless I do the CPU fixes (priority to low and disable core0). With the fixes it's good. In all cases I still get a hitch here and there when 'discovering' something new or when I reach a progression point. I guess something goes wrong in the communication with the server?

- On ultra unlocked it runs from 40 to 120 fps. With everything on high, but with 8x MSAA and 16x AF it runs at 80-90+ most of the time and never seems to drop below 60 except in some of the usual spots and even then it's not too bad. Game doens't look much worse too. The game actually runs kinda okay at <60 framerates too as long it's locked.

- My CPU seems to be cruising. Very low load across the board (50% on like 3-4 of the 8 threads, 10-20% on the others, the first one 5-10% since I disabled that one for FH3). Apex was much better here (apart from running around twice as good in general). This smells like a bad DX11 game with only the DX12 checkbox ticked. Apart from a (bad) open world technical implementation, it seems they didn't even bother to look at the latest version of Apex?

- The game eats memory. 4GB of VRAM is used to the max and it uses 10+GB of system memory and 10+GB of the page file pretty quick.

- Surfers Paradise... more like Crash Paradise. There's an exact specific spot in the city which always results in a crash or even a GPU driver BSOD. Other spots in the city have a high risk of crashing too. Apparently setting the static geometry to medium fixes it for some so I guess I should try that. EDIT: that seems to have fixed it.

The crashes are performance is the biggest bummer. I can get the game to run somewhat okay (although this game should run a lot better in general), but avoiding certain areas because of the certainty of crashing is silly

@shivoa: Ok that explains alot, seems weird to me there is no hardware requirement for DX12. Still the game fails in all those parts where DX12 is supposed to do it better than 11 so its still hilarious :)