Quick Look: Forza Horizon 3

For anyone who cares - yes this is Australia. Surfer's Paradise looks very much like Surfer's Paradise. The 12 Apostles look like the 12 Apostles (but not the sand, those cars would just sink in it). The environments look Australian. That one announcer guy sounds like a British guy doing an Australian accent though. If you wanted to use "THE" Australian car it would be a Holden Commodore ute not the Mad Max car.

Needs more roos and screaming cockatoos.

I'll get round to buying this some time over the weekend, but my abiding memory of the quick look is that the map screen instantly reminded me of this:

Wonderful album. ;)

Uh...Australia...uh...driving on the left...uh...performance issues.

I'll just put it somewhere furtheron my list. Right down here. I would so much rather have the previous 2 games released for PC instead.

So this just continues the trend of most pc games released for UWP not performing great.. I guess my only purchased game will still be Tomb Raider and that was because I could get it for 8 bucks thanks to the region exploit you could do.

With my 970 / i7 4970K and 8GB RAM I was getting persistent stuttering on APEX (although framerate stayed high at all times). Upgrading to 16GB RAM has completely resolved that issue for me - not tried Horizon 3 yet but I'm hopeful that it'll perform comparably. Don't know what's going on on the QL / Jeff's Home PC... could it be a RAM issue (we're seeing the start of >8GB RAM requirements.

@rebellion91: I know what you mean. There's something about the graphical style. It looks a bit..."cartoony"? For lack of a better term.

2016's PC versions are just a fucking trainwreck so far. Bummer.

I'm pretty sure you can upload your own music tracks to OneDrive or put them in a specific folder on your pc. Haven't messed around with that uet though

I think it's probably MSAA bombing the fps. I still don't have my copy available because i didn't pay 100 euros but i'll rock a gtx 970 , so i hope that it's just the demanding msaa that is causing trouble to jeff.

Looking at the night races, is it a medium settings thing that only the player car has headlights on?

If Microsoft want people to buy stuff from their store, they need to actually make this shit fucking work. I'd be seriously pissed if I paid £80 for a game and then it didn't work. The game has a bunch of issues from not installing, crashing, no DLC and horrible performance.

Digital Foundry were able to run the game at 4K@60fps with a Titan X Pascal but he did note that the process took 2 days where his install of Windows 10 Anniversary update was just busted and the store kept crashing and couldn't download the game. Other people are reporting that the game isn't using CPU cores correctly so that's creating a bottleneck for super powerful GPUs that should be able to run the game with no issues.

I've tried some free games on the Windows store and the performance has been fine such as Killer Instinct and Forza Apex but it seems the paid games such as Gears of War, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Quantum Break all had issues at least at launch.

EDIT: Just went and checked out performance on Forza Apex and did they release a stealth update to that game? It runs like absolute butter on my PC now with everything at its maximum but with MSAA turned off. I have a GTX 770 with a i7-4770K@3.5Ghz CPU and 16GB RAM. Previously it ran ok but now I can get 60fps+ even in the rain where my fps used to tank.

EDIT 2: Joker's performance test shows that they should be getting much better performance than there are getting with the GTX 1080 that can run the game at 4K at 50fps @ultra so 60fps should be achievable with some settings turned down. Even the RX 480 can run the game at 60fps at 1080p so I've no idea what's going on.

no destructible vehicles? oh ... my

how many more years will we wait for a game as good as burnout takedown

I can't decide if I want to spend $60 on this. It's a lot of money, but it doesn't look like the pinnacle of Forza. I also still haven't even touched The Crew and it's DLC which I bought awhile ago. I'm so conflicted!

Man this game has some flat lighting.

yup PC version needs a patch pronto

I wished they turned down their MSAA because that's one of the biggest performance drainers but there must be something else going on that it occasionally micro stutters.

Funny that ReCore ran like poop on console while PC was better and now it's reverse in the case of this game. Hopefully Gears 4 will be the one to excel on both?

I played the first two Horizon games to death and I'm not seeing anything here that's dragging me back in.

Na, something is up that means even with the new drivers some users get the stuttering still and some get these terrible drops (possibly while loading assets if the menu UI code is anything to go by then at least one of those code paths is flat out busted). I doubt they set the priority of the task to Low so that can help but also this game needs a patch.

I can run 1080p Medium noAA and get basically the same framerate and occasional drops as 1440p Ultra 8xMSAA. Marginal different in frequency of the drops but nothing major, which is why everyone is saying this game is weirdly CPU-bound on PC (despite running just fine on a large tablet SoC - the Jaguar cores in the XB1 are not desktop-class core). When running an uncapped framerate, this game rarely get near 100% GPU load on any of those settings.

GeForce Experience actually recommends 8xMSAA as their ~60fps default for my 1070. Even their test servers showed that the GPU wasn't being loaded and cranking up the MSAA didn't make a major difference to perf.

i played this from midnight yesterday to noon when i finally passed out. i woke up after UPF ended. now my sleep cycle is fucked up. thanks forza horizon 3.

PC version needs some patches for sure, the performance variance looks nausea inducing.

The abnormally high system requirements for these Xbox One PC ports seems fucking mind-boggling. If they continue to optimize the PC versions this poorly, people are going to start ignoring them. Maybe that's part of their plan to get more people to buy One's, but it just makes them look lazy.

One of these days I'm gonna buy a car game, they seem pretty fun. I think I can wait until I can get a PC where they are this pretty and run well too, though.

Well, time for me to start work on a small new (high perf 3D) engine and *looks at example of 1st party DX12 engines coming out of MS*, I guess I'm going to be getting very familiar with Vulkan over the next couple of years then!

You have to wonder if MS realise they actually need to show why DX12 is the actual threaded path forward for the industry. Apple are pushing Metal, Sony have their GNM/GNMX with PSSL, and everyone is sort of ok with Vulkan (in as much as Khronos continues to be a threat, even if OpenGL is not something with much traction outside of porting to other PC OS).

A Wild Daniel Bloodworth appears!

This really wasn't on my horizon, but all the good vibes in the last week are gonna make me pick it up.

Edit: Ugh, I should ban myself for that first sentence.

Of course you won't get great performance when you have 4x msaa AND fxaa on. You should know that by now.

@csl316: Yup

Well Jeff says those options are what the game recommends for his hardware and its clearly not good settings for his hardware which was his point. Also PC settings is unknown territory for the Giantbomb staff, you should know that by know.

I had some trouble getting it to run well last night. Figured it was related to some issues I had installing the latest drivers but when I finally managed to get it installed it was still the same. I was confused because I was running it at Ultra 60 fps stable the night before in Virtual Desktop on my RIft which creates some additional rendering overhead (not much). Then the solution presented itself when UPF was over and I closed that browser window... very weird. Must be some weird priority thing. Haven't had problems while running YouTube or GiantBomb videos on the second monitor after that and I actually restarted the computer during the UPF... very weird.

Dude! My dad had a Fiat X1/9!

For people who like their open world racing games gratis, The Crew is free on uPlay for another week or so.

@rethla: In my experience the recommendations games give for the graphic settings are useless. The GB staff could be a little more professional about this kind of thing.

@amwbox: Nah, I've been playing it on my PC w/ the 1070. Working great.

Btw, you can use your drone for those barns. Once you fly up to it in your drone, it marks on your map and you can drive straight to it.

Yes.

4xMSAA + FXAA? It's weird that they even offer both simultaneously. Disable FXAA and just use MSAAx4. Or the other way around but FXAA is typically less spectacular, though more economic in FPS

@jeff: Would love to hear the results if you try this out.

This game looks great, but probably won't run on my PC.

This looks to be on par with Horizon 2, and along with the friends integration that's good enough for me. I'm also unreasonably excited for the Groove stuff.

I also like how Jeff has started every Horizon QL by doing donuts and how each one has a different co-pilot. Jason for Horizon 4 pls

is framerate smoothing something i should be keeping on?

4xMSAA is destroying the frame rate. Other benchmarks with the same GPU are getting anywhere from 60-100fps.

I like how the only folders on the desktop are Wallpapers. Downloads and "Crap".

No, its not. While it may be generally correct that lots of games (which are GPU-limited) benefit greatly from turning the AA down, Horizon 3 seems to be generally CPU-bound and so lots of reports (including my own testing) are that MSAA makes almost no difference to perf. The GPU isn't being maxed out and has spare processing to sampling multiple times on the polygon edges. This is a perf bug that lots of people are getting and wasn't solved for all system by the driver update (which reports from pre-release are that even more people were getting exactly this stuttering issue with perf holes before the driver update).

FXAA + MSAA is generally bad (the argument: MSAA removes the aliased shapes that FXAA looks for so why even bother running that pass?) is the traditional wisdom. But if you look at the extent of the foliage (where the edge of the object isn't the polygon/quad boundary but the texture transparency bit) and shader aliasing (when the light blows something out so it's not a polygon edge that's aliasing but the shader adding harsh gradients) in this game, there is clearly a case for running FXAA to at least reduce the aliasing of those elements here, even with MSAA making sure the polygon edges aren't aliased.

This is the new wisdom [see note in link] and why temporal solutions are going to be the future: MSAA was great when aliasing was an issue at polygon boundaries (as we even brute-forced SSAA for semi-transparent quads which is how games got round foliage issues before - a rather expensive approach but effective) but now we've got shader aliasing all over the place, it's time to look at new solutions.

Is there an SSD in that machine? That helps with open world games not chugging in my experience.

@shivoa: Cool info, thanks for the link/read!

Game looks great. It's taking all my willpower not to buy that stupid $100 edition to start playing straight away. However, I am disappointed to see an entire Forza game Quick Look without cockpit view, which is, as we all know, the only acceptable camera view for simulation and semi-simulation racing.

The back wheels of the Warthog don't turn with the front wheels, so I'm out.

Halo 4 ruined the look of the Warthog along with a few other things, like the sniper rifle and shotgun. Not to mention what they did to the sounds.

I dunno, this looks soulless... It's open world driving side missions : the game.

I don't know what it is, but this doesn't feel "cool". Just looks boring.

Did anyone else notice the supercharger option for the XB Falcon there was the same supercharger as is in Mad Max? That's pretty cool that they made that supercharger so you can match the movie car.

So how long till the music patched out due to licensing expirations?