Forza Apex Beta available to download now

You can now download the beta to Forza Apex now from the Windows 10 store. The game is 18.8 GBs and requires a minimum: 64 bit Windows 10 (v. 1511); CPU: Intel Core i3-4170 @ 3.7Ghz; Memory: 8 GB RAM (2 GB VRAM), GPU: Radeon R7 250X / GeForce GT 740 or equivalent; HD Space: 30 GB; DirectX 12

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/games/forza-motorsport-6-apex/9nblggh3shm7

I'll update with some impressions later on.

Not up for me yet. Can't wait to try it out.

Nevermind, had to close and open the store again. Woo!

Thanks for the heads up!
Downloading!

Forza 3 was my last mainline Forza so this (smaller) version of F6 will be great. I'm honestly most excited about finally having a game with rumble triggers though.

Download Forza Hub from the store to go along with this. I already had it and it gave me a Nissan GT-R for Apex.

Runs like crap. That's disappointing. They have a long way to go before hoping to put a full Forza game on PC.

@thatonedudenick: Really? I'm doing fine on a 970 and a I5 6500, everything turned up to the maximum at 1080 and as far I can tell it's close to 60 or close enough. I can't be certain about the framerate since you can't use any only a couple monitoring software on these terrible Windows apps but it feels solid.

Edit: If you're on AMD, I think they just released a driver for this game.

Any idea about wheel support?

@dave_tacitus: No wheel support right now. They've said they're working on adding it in the future.

@topsteer: Cheers. I'll give it a pass for now then.

It's running pretty well for me on my 970. This is actually the first forza game I've ever played. It's cool how the trigger vibration also works on this version. I thought maybe that feature was just not included in the drivers, I wonder why we haven't seen it on any other driving games for windows?

@dave_tacitus: From my understanding, it's the limitation of UWP but this limitation will be removed with the upcoming anniversary update which will also allow mods, overlays and more. Should hear more about it at E3.

As for performance, it's running fine for me with a few dropped frames here and there. I do however just have things set to dynamic at the moment. I did notice that the frame rate of the in-car mirror seems to be much lower than that of the actual game. I'm guessing it's at 30fps.

@mrcraggle: Sweet.

@xanadu: Trigger vibrations? That's it. I'm downloading now - Having had an Xbone pad for a year but no Xbone, I want to see how that feels if nothing else. ;)

4690k and 970 with the new drivers. Barely getting 30fps on medium. Eyeballing it because none of my performance overlays work with it.

@thatonedudenick: overlays don't currently work right now due to UWP. Will be coming in the Windows 10 anniversary update. Surprised by poor performance. Have you tested just letting the game detect your settings?

"DEFAULT INSTALL LOCATION: Forza Motorsport 6: Apex will install to the default location set by your device. To see where the game will install as default, press the Windows key, type “Storage” and then select ‘Storage.’ Here you can choose which drive apps will save to by default."

Are they seriously not allowing people to choose where to put the damn files?

@hassun: You can move (some, not all) apps to another location in Settings>Apps & Features. Don't know if it'll work with Forza as its still downloading but I've done it with the one other game I bought on the W10 store - GTA SA.

@mrcraggle:I think the game puts everything to 'Dynamic' on default (which is like a Halo 5 esque ingame change of resolution and settings?) and I think I'm getting better performance when I'm setting everything up by myself. Seems 60fps with some drops on 1080p with car and track details on max, rest down one or two notches on an 4790K + a R9 270X. It does give me low video memory warnings, but whatever.

@dave_tacitus: Isn't that only for the drive? I haven't seen any map control for the store apps.

Have you tired turning off the dynamic optimizations (or whatever it's called)? It will give you access to a lot more settings including the framerate target. It's default detection of settings is terrible. I have a 3570K and a 970 and it was putting me on medium locked at 30. It was using about 20% of my GPU. I set the target to 60 upped many of the settings, and it ran and looked much better. It's still only using ~80% of my GPU, but now it's pushing my CPU to 100% at times. The game is pretty RAM heavy though. It was using over 5GB when in a race.

That said, I've also had the game hard lock on me three times (out of five attempts) while trying to load a race. I think I'm going to hold off on this one for a while until they push out a few patches.

@gundogan: Nope, it's for apps. It adds an inaccessible WindowsApps folder to the drive you choose to move things to.

Its hilarious that Windows games are the worst games for Windows. How do they even manage this crap?

I don't get it. I've only played the opening Rio race but it runs great. So how did they manage what?

Also, there's a certain Windows Store game that is one of the best PC games.

@ez123: Minesweeper?

Seriously, what was your point?

No problems at all here. Game's running fantastically (980ti, 4670k, 16GB RAM) at full settings. Rumbly triggers!

@gundogan I was able to move the game to another drive without any problems.

@dave_tacitus: I was happy that I finally had a PC game that used that feature but it's better than just the rumbling from different surfaces. The Left Trigger feels like braking, there's a friction to it.

@ez123: Yep, I'm pleasantly surprised with the effect.

The game seems to have a good selection of tracks and cars too, especially considering it's a freebie demo/beta. Forza was one of the only reasons I had an OG Xbox and 360 so I'm over the moon we've got it on PC.

Wowza, Not surprisingly it looks really nice...
Especially once I got to the race with the rain effects going.
I've got a 290x (latest drivers released yesterday) and the only issue I've seen is some shadow flickering in that first night race.

@dave_tacitus: Ya dude, the rumble triggers are awesome with Forza, glad you decided to try without the wheel support.

Oh.. Its Win10 only?

Bleh

I gleefully went into the graphics menu, turned all the doo-dads to Ultra and frame target to 60. One or two random frame drops, but no real issues on my 6600K, 980, and 16 GB RAM.

Despite having the newest drivers, my Radeon 7850 couldn't hack the first race and crashed about 90 seconds in. Oh well.

I'm well due an upgrade, since I haven't got one since 2012, but considering it can run MGS V and GTA V just fine, I'm wondering is this game really resource heavy, or just very poorly optimised for lower spec PCs? At least it was free to try out, I'd have been well cheesed off if I had paid full retail only to find this out.

I'm surprised how well it runs on my 770. I have everything maxed with no issues. I found that the dynamic stuff was actually causing more issues than it was helping.

Played a little last night. At first it ran like garbage, but then I installed the latest nvidia driver, and it runs fantastic now. Everything turned up, runs at a steady 60, and looks great.

As a free-to-play game, they don't have any intrusive microtransactions. I only looked at a few cars, but they all were a $1 to unlock early, or you can earn medals to unlock cars. There is also that Forza Hub thing that you have to install to unlock a car every month, which seems kind of weird, but as a free game, I'm more than happy with it.

I didn't think this weekend I'd want to just play Forza 6 with the Overwatch beta going on, but all I want to do is play more Forza. Also, rumble triggers are amazing.

Not really sure what you're getting at. Are you just a grumpy guy? Forza and Killer Instinct are both great. It's not like games you buy on Steam are immune to issues.

The game runs pretty good for a win10 store game. Not too sure about the actual game. It looks nice, but not that realistic because of the extra effects. But it's more of an arcade game so it's alright I guess. The engine audio is a bit of a let down. The cars sounds a bit tame and monotone. And I'm not a big fan of how it drives (driving with assists off). A bit too slidey for my taste, even for an arcadey race game. Driving like a maniac with lots of drifting can be decent fun, but when driving 'clean' it just doesn't feel right to me compared to say Assetto Corsa or a more simulator race game. Maybe I need to tweak the controls a bit or just wait for wheel support.

Weird. Runs amazingly and i have an older graphics card.

Games bought on the Windows Store treats games as apps that come with a load of dumb restrictions not seen in other versions bought elsewhere. Here is a good article about the limitations of games on the Windows Store.

@topsteer: Forza and Killer Instinct are both great.

Yes but the Windows Store versions are not.

Edit: I'm not saying anything bad about the games themselves, just that universal apps suck. I haven't played Killer Instinct but Id rather play the Xbox version than have to deal with the UWP bullshit.

@topsteer: You should really get over that. KI for PC is much better than the Xbox version.

@hunkulese: KI on PC is fantastic. I don't know if it's much better than Xbox because Digital Foundry found that everything (besides resolution, duh) was the same. They didn't add any extra effects/ better textures like Forza seems to have but it's a fantastic game that has worked flawlessly since day one. No complaints here.

We seem to be arguing about different things, you about the games quality and I'm maybe poorly arguing about the Windows Store. Let me put it this way, what if the Windows 10 Store was around when Dark Souls was released and it was available only there? With the limitations of UWPs there would be no DSfix or such, everybody would be forced to play it as it was originally released and hope for the devs to fix it. If the next Bethesda game releases on Windows Store, would you buy it knowing that you can't mod it?

Microsoft has said a lot about them fixing this stuff but given their track record with PC I'm hard pressed to believe anything they say until they do it.

@topsteer: That's the beauty of PC gaming though; there will always be multiple storefronts to get games from. I highly doubt we'll see any third party games have their games exclusively released through the Windows 10 store. If the only games released through the Windows 10 store are Microsoft exclusives, I'm okay with that. If I was super into the idea of playing their games, I'd get an Xbox One, but I'm not, so just poking at their games on PC occasionally is fine with me, especially if they are free.

As long as Valve, and now GoG, is around, I don't think we'll have to worry about a one ecosystem future. Obviously we can't predict the future, so who knows what will happen down the road. But I'm optimistic that the Windows 10 store won't become more than a first-party distributor for Microsoft.

@topsteer: The original point was that the Windows games were the worst games on Windows and that's far from true. Killer Instinct and Forza both run great and don't require mods or anything else to make them enjoyable. They're console games running on PC. If they were games that required mods, it would be different, but they're not. There's really no reason not to play either of them on PC, unless they didn't fix that refresh rate problem with KI.

@brandondryrock: I know that Dark Souls situation would never happen but even if a game like that is released everywhere it would still suck horribly for anyone who bought it on Windows Store. I hope MS does loosen up these restrictions cause I bet they could throw their weight around and make a great storefront.

@hunkulese: Yeah I realize now that I misinterpreted your original reply to someone else. I thought you didn't know about the problems with Windows Store and that you thought Steam had similar issues. I'm sorry for the dumb argument and confusion.

@topsteer: Yeah, it would suck horribly, but consumers need to do a bit of research before purchasing a product. I don't feel bad for people who bought Rise of the Tomb Raider on the Windows 10 Store over Steam.

@rethla: KI ran just fine for me so i think it's a case by case basis.

Well what i ment is that the Windows store is the worst place to purchase games for Windows on. Maybe i was a bit unclear.

That's not what you meant. Let's pretend that the first sentence is just "unclear".

"How do they even manage this crap?" doesn't make sense at all it the context of this thread. At the very least, you could admit to trolling.