Honest question here, I read the patch notes, unlocked my frame rate, and still had crippling stutter anywhere near the city. My friend still crashes out about 1/4 of the time when joining an online race. Has anyone noticed any actual improvements?

Edit: Actually, I finally got my Warthog, so that's something I guess.

Well, before I could play the game at a locked 30 FPS with occasional crashes. Now the game won't even start, so I guess it did something. Crashes after loading when either entering the festival or during the cutscene to start driving.

I'm strongly considering a refund at this point. I just got off the line with Microsoft Accounts & Billing chat, and they said they would grant me a refund if I wanted one. I'm going to think about it a bit more.

@mike: Have you tried turning off Avatar Customization in the HUD Gameplay options ?

It's worse for me since the patch. Before, unlocked framerates with the CPU priority and affinity fixes was fairly stutter free. Now that gives me frequent small stutters. Without the the fixes, unlocked framerates is better now since it was unplayable before. But I can only get sort of stutter free gameplay if I lock the framerate with vsync and framerate smoothing turned on. :\

I didn't pay full price for it and the game is still sort of playable so it's not the end of the world for me, but yea... there's still a lot of room for improvement. And it's a very good game gameplay wise too, so it would be a waste if they can't fix things.

I fixed most of the ingame crashes by turning static geometry to medium. Only get a very occasional crash on startup now.

Patch broke the game completely - it won't even load. So I refunded and thats that.

@erbarad: I didn't even know the Windows store had a refund policy

@mrcraggle: Just spoke with their online support. It took like 2 minutes and was super smooth and easy.

@mike: That sucks, dude. Hopefully the next patch is a step forward instead.

If it were me (I'm downloading the game for the 'Bone now, will play on PC when I have my video card), I'd err towards holding onto it for a bit. Forza Horizon games aren't really meant to be played intensively at launch, they're this big bucket of content that you're meant to slow-burn through between games over the two years until the next Horizon installment. If you try to burn through it quickly then you run into the problems Jeff has with the series. That means that 90% of your play time with this game should come after the first month, by which time they've hopefully ironed out most of the launch issues.

Pre-patch, I was running the game at 60 FPS 80% of the time, with dips into mid-50s. During one specific showcase race the game ran at 45 FPS, and then towards the finish line it jumped back up to 60. It was odd, but for the most part the game runs fine for me, so I wasn't complaining.

Yesterday I update the game, boot it up, and it doesn't go above 21 FPS. I had read some people re-installing the game fixed their performance issues, so I did that. While waiting for it download again, I started playing Mankind Divided, and it was running poorly as well. I usually run at a steady 60 FPS on high settings, so something was messed up with my computer. I did a fresh install of the latest Nvidia driver, rebooted my computer, finished installing FH3 to my SSD, and it ran like it did pre-patch. I even bumped it up to the ultra preset (I was playing on the high preset) to see what would happen, and it ran a lot better than I was expecting.

Oh, also, I read the latest Windows update enabled the Xbox DVR, so I'd also check that as well. That was causing some performance issues in other games too.

I really hope they can continue to optimize the game. It already runs well for me, and the game is incredible. If they can smooth it out, get rid of the stuttering, etc; then it will be one of my favorite games of 2016. I had heard that PC users have a month to refund the game. I don't if that's true, but if it is, Playground has a month to fix a majority of the problems. If not, I think a lot of people will be refunding.

EDIT: If anyone is curious, my specs are: i5-4690K @ 4 GHz, GTX 980, 16 GB RAM.

I really hope that they can fix this. I'd love to play it but I have a GTX 770 and if it's running like shit on much more powerful hardware I know I have no chance. Forza Apex ran ok for me when that came out but now I can run it at maximum settings and I wasn't even aware of any updates that improved performance massively so that was a nice surprise. It seems that anything that's free performs well or great, the second MS charge for it, there's massive performance problems (this, Gears Ultimate, Quantum Break, Tomb Raider). Hopefully Gears 4 will actually come out and just work.

The game was stuttery pre-patch and now it is so stutttery it is unplayable.

This is disappointing. I'll just hafta keep playing the Xbox One version until they can hopefully iron these framerate issues out. Could this be a ploy by Microsoft to draw more Xbox One sales?

No way, they've been pushing the whole Play Anywhere and PC thing so hard.

Patch fixed the stuttering for me. I do have my frame rate locked at 30.

Also noticed the input lag is more in line with the Xbox one ver now.

and all this after i got it at least playable on pc at locked 30. maybe ill be the exception that sees improved performance.

vulkan integration mayhaps? (i keed...)

Well, now when the game BSODs my PC, it will boot back up without me having to redownload the whole game, so that's kind of progress.

I would say the patch has helped, specifically with stuttering, but I already kinda found a solution that works for me. I've settled for running the game in 1440p @ 36fps with vsync on and all settings on Ultra, including 8x MSAA (I have a 970). I also have a 144hz G-Sync monitor, which is why it's using 36 and not 30. I am not quite settled on whether vsync should be on or off, because G-sync should compensate if I turn it off. I don't really have input lag problems with a driving game though anyway.

The 2 main reasons for using the lowest fps are:

1. I play the game on my Xbox some of the time, and the 30fps there is amazingly smooth and looks great. I think somewhere I read that the Xbox seems to be running basically Ultra settings and high MSAA, and I'd have to agree. I think driving games may be the only type of game where 30fps works for me. The motion blur and other post-processing they do is key to this, and FH is best in class here. Like others have said, the sense of speed is fantastic.

2. On PC with my 970, when I set a locked 36fps, I can crank all of the settings up to Ultra, including using 8x MSAA (Ultra preset is 4x). It is possible to run the game at higher fps (the next setting is 48fps), but there are parts of the world where there is slowdown and to me that's unacceptable in this kind of game. Any hitching kills it for me, which is why I say the patch does seem to have fixed it. I played a few hours today on PC and it was really nice. To get to the higher fps, I would also have to downgrade the quality settings, which leads into the nightmare world of min/maxing advanced graphics settings. I use Geforce Experience to pick settings so I can avoid that anxiety, but the settings it defaults to for my card are mostly medium, yuck! Rock solid 36fps + max settings is a good feeling. :)

I'm not even able to download the game on PC. It pulls down about a gig then locks until I do a computer restart then pulls some more of the file. I've wasted hours trying to resolve it. And was pretty defeated when it restarted after pulling 40 of 49 gigs. This whole thing has left a sour taste in my mouth for xbox first party games on windows.

CPU usage seems to be distributed a little better amongst the cores, but beyond that performance is more or less identical to the previous version. I've settled for capping it at 48Hz and that's been fine. It still doesn't properly support GSync which makes the occasional frame rate dips a little more perceptible, so hopefully that's on their radar too.

@drzing: G-sync setting is an world of its own.

Generally though if you have G-sync on that should override everything else and the v-sync settings doesnt matter. There are exeptions to this however, when you got higher fps than your screen can handle g-sync gets out of play. Most games will activate some hidden settings when you enable v-sync that is supposed to optimize your game for v-sync use and can affect you negatively because you aint actually using v-sync.

Ok so I finally tried the PC version post patch and I'm getting a solid 30fps with high Dynamic Render Quality at 1080p now. Not as good as I was hoping for but an improvement nonetheless. My specs are...

GTX 970

i5 2500k (oc'd to 4.2ghz)

16GB RAM

Veering a bit off topic, but can anyone hazard a guess as to why I only have the option for 30fps when vsync is enabled, regardless of resolution/quality? I would swear that used to be an option. I'm running a 1080 and a 6700k. Unlocked is mostly above 60, but the tearing drives me crazy, and nvidia control panel can't do anything to the app (presumably because it's the weird sandbox environment and not a .exe).

@erbarad: Are you running the latest fast ring insider build of Windows 10? If so, yeah, it will crash after the first launch. A restart will fix it. A little annoying, but a new insider build should drop at any time.

How do you guys actually see if theres a patch and if its downloading/downloaded?

I cant see anything in windows store apart from the very usefull information "This product is installed".

Nope, still runs like ass at locked 60 fps. (If I unlock it, I can get like 80fps in some areas. My hardware is solid.)

PC: i5 6600k @stock, GTX 980, 16GB

I'm fed up with the stuttering at this point, so I set it down to 30 fps. Bumped up the quality to Ultra for shits and giggles and, despite a warning, it seems to be solid, even in Surfers Paradise.

Even if the game is CPU bound, it's still unoptimized garbage. Most people don't get an i7. I'm of the belief that if people can't run your game 1080p/60 on the best i5 and a pretty good GPU, yah done fucked up your PC version. It sounds like a lot of people can barely get a solid 60 on a 1070, which is overkill for 1080p.

I'm starting to believe Horizon games aren't meant to be run above 30 fps, and with FH3 on PC they're brute forcing it. Which is weird, since it's the same engine as Motorsport. But given the entirety of everyone's experience so far, that seems to check out.

@rethla: In the store next to the search bar is your account icon -> download and updates to see the history. The last Forza patch is 1.0.14.2.

@gundogan: Thanks, i got the latest patch it seems but i havnt noticed any different performance.

@mike: I had constant crashes pre-patch, and got rid of them completely by deactivating my mic for Forza Horizon 3 on the app level (in privacy settings).

@hurvilo: That didn't do anything for me, I tried it.

Haven't played today but put a few hours in yesterday. I got decent results by manually locking fps to 55 in Nvidia Inspector.

Before that I'd found the patch had lessened the big stutters but small stutters were much more frequent - every 100yds or so. Locking it to just under 60 doesn't make them go away completely but they're much less common.

1080p Ultra/980ti/4670k @4.2/16GB RAM/SSD

Can also report that after patch I'm now worse off. Went from low 40's-Stable 50's most of the time, down to low 30's - 40's. 1080P's GTX970 on an i5 something or other with 8GB RAM.. Man i was really enjoying this too, now i just feels unplayable! Even locking at 30 seems to have this strange stuttering effect.

Did it do anything? Yeah, it made the stuttery, poorly optimized game a stuttery, poorly optimized crashing mess of a game. Things aren't looking very good for this game ever getting fixed.

I got little to no changes which is ok I guess for now because I can play the game just fine apart from the occasional hitches

How many having issues have tried changing core affinity and setting priority to low for the game? That fixed the stuttering for me.

The most common fixes seem to be try disabling or enabling the dynamic optimization stuff (I have it disabled, play mostly on ultra with a few exceptions to keep a steadier 60), and doing the following for core affinity and priority:

1) Open task manager and the game

2) Right click "Forza Horizon 3" and click "go to details"

3) Right click "forza_x64_release_final.exe" and click "Set Affinity"

4) Uncheck "Core 0" and leave everything else checked.

I also disabled game DVR. I normally have it disabled as it occasionally causes issues in games and I never use it having Shadowplay available to do it without any performance issues. I think it helped a bit but stuttering remained until the affinity fix.

I don't know that there's a way to do the affinity stuff permanently as creating a shortcut doesn't work as it does for a non-Store app, but you can do that every time you start the game. Minor hassle but the game is smooth for me with that done.

Framerate still isn't locked at 60 or anything but it's hovering at 55-60 95% of the time for me.

What? That's a very kneejerk reaction. The game hasn't seen that many patches (one or two right?) and optimization isn't that simple. There are a few fixes to reduce or remove the stuttering for most folks, which I posted above. Sometimes patches cause issues, and then another patch will fix that.

I understand being frustrated but this is why we wait until a game is in good shape before buying it. Only reason I pre-ordered was because I knew that Xbox version at the very least would be solid and I have an Xbone to play on if the PC doesn't work out.

Hopefully they do get it worked out. If not, you can always ask for a refund and just get your money back.

@sithtoast: Nope, regular Windows 10 with anniversary update.

Still hitches every now and then, but 90% of the time it runs vsync at 60, 1080p all ultra settings. GTX 1070. 4790k. 16gb ram, ssd.

hrmm.. i'm not having any problems at 4k and, when uncapped, getting 80+ fps, ultra, etc.. (MSAA is at 2x and i shut of the dynamic setting thingy too.) That said I've only done a few races.

I just got the game today and i'm running a fresh install of windows 1607 (anniversary update isn't an "update" but a new OS). I'm also running (after DDU) 373.06 drivers.

SLI doesn't work (BOO!) but it doesn't need it.

What does suck is you can't capture without sync on (and god damn you take a BIG perf hit with dxtory is capturing)

Nope, still pretty much a mess. It tends to stay locked at 60 FPS while free roaming, but during races when other cars are on screen, and especially if there's weather effects to show up (rain, sun reflecting on the road, etc.), it dips hard. Usually no lower than 45-ish, but occasionally sub-30. I have a GTX 1080 and i7 6700K, for the record, playing this game on Ultra@1080p, though the "Ultra" part of that seems to hardly make a difference; it's not as if the game runs well if I turn it down even as low as medium.

The thing is, it's not as if the game's ever truly taxing my system. The temps stay pretty low and the fans never kick on as they might if I were to play Doom on Ultra at 4x the frame rate. It's just straight-up an awfully-optimized game.

i'm running a titan X (pascal) and OC'n the CPU to over 2ghz and the ram +400mhz

digital foundry said they found the OC of the mem to help a lot.

Um.... no?
As before i hit 60 most of the time with constant stutter, doesn't seem to have improved anything.

@opusofthemagnum said:

If the patch only caused more issues for me? Then sure, absolutely. But judging from performance threads here and on NeoGAF, this patch made the game worse for the majority of players. And not in a "my framerate in Surfer's Paradise is 3 or 4 frames worse" kind of way, but a "my game is now crashing when it never did before" kind of way. I'm just not confident that this game will ever get "fixed", no matter how many patches they put out for it. I hope I'm wrong, I do, but I'm just not confident.

@captain_felafel: I don't feel like a couple of patches is enough information to make that assumption but to each his own. I'd rather take a "wait and see" stance. These devs are very capable, especially on the tech side. It's also early days for the cross play program so maybe it doesn't have enough pull to encourage the proper attention it needs.

It's pointless to get angry because a game isn't perfect at launch, nor to assume that it'll never get better because one patch didn't fix things. Patches can be wonky sometimes and these guys are not normally PC devs. Wait to see if they figure it out, and if it's that frustrating get a refund until the game is fixed and let it be a lesson for future purchases.

I felt the same way. I got a full refund for Forza and bought Gears. It's too bad because when the game actually ran it was great.

it better do somthing.. im on the 3rd time for re-installing the full game. the installer fucking sucks. its shit itself 3 times after installing 48GB of the patch.

I to have just had a refund from Windows Support, took about 10 minutes or so and most of the wait was being in a queue. Have to admit the Microsoft representative was very helpful and took about 4 minutes to refund me the full cost. I was looking forward to FH3 but it's clear the PC version is a mess and I doubt Turn10/Playground games will rush to fix the issues. According to some who've dug deeper into the issues its a much more substantial issue with the port that's causing most of the problems. I don't have the greatest PC but when you hit below 30fps on the lowest settings with a GTX 1070 you know somethings up. I waited for the patch but like many it seemed to make things worse, game kept crashing every few minutes. At least it sounds like the Gear 4 PC version is rock solid.

Shame to, it's a fun game when it works right. I still prefer the Motorsport series more though, I really enjoy the circuit racing. Let's hope Microsoft do a better job with the next one of those.

The patch wiped my video settings (so same thing that Forza 6: Apex does) and even when I'd put them back, they didn't seem to be working correctly. [Why do devs think this is an ok thing to do when applying a patch: don't delete my settings, if you must offer me the chance to wipe them for the patched new perf levels then at least let me choose not to reset them!]

Drops to 40fps not uncommon (for a game I'd managed to just about lock to the 60fps cap) and when I turned v-sync off I noticed that it wasn't turning off right. Sometimes it would de-cap and jump back to 70-100fps that I'd managed to eek out of my system (the only way to make sure the dips didn't drop below 60fps was to OC the CPU so that the typical fps was around 80; the GPU was never getting fully taxed even at 1440p Ultra 4xMSAA settings) but often it would cap itself at 62 fps (or even sit at 60). I dropped all the way down to 720p Low and same issue of the fps drops was there too and the fps would keep on locking to 60fps despite being off in the settings (as in I'd be driving and find areas of the map where it consistently capped, areas where the cap seemed to be off, and areas where I ran into the framerate drops). [I've never gotten the 30fps cap to work properly with my system, it always feels incredibly jerky and with too much input lag - so fixing the settings so 60fps works is basically required to play the game]

I have no idea what I did to fix it, nothing I changed seemed to have an effect (but I did investigate several things and found out the game currently run at 4K High-Ultra 4xMSAA at around 50fps with drops to the same ~40 seen at far more modest settings - so clearly I've found the ceiling for starting to hit GPU limits as well as CPU limits) but after a while and several hours of play and tweak, I went back into the game and it went back to behaving like it was before the patch. Only I'd not tweaked anything, I'd just changed the settings back to where they were for several tests before. But the temperamental fps cap seemed to go away and at the same time the regular fps drops into the 40s mostly went away. It's not quite as good/60-locked as it was pre-patch but it's almost there and I could safely enable v-sync again and go about my merry way. But I've no idea what I did that removed the defective behaviour and it's certainly no better than it was pre-patch. And all this still requires me to hit 5GHz because everything is limited by the single-core speed of your CPU to remove the fps drops during play.

@shivoa: i think its more an issue of the pre patch settings not being compatible with the post patch setting because they changed hardcoded stuff. They wouldnt wipe it if they didnt had to.

Sure they could spend x amount of manhours to make sure your settings merge properly with the new patch but many would call that wasted time. Especially when they have so much other problems with the pc version to attend.

@rethla: Literally every setting (we see a UI that exposes all the settings you can pick) is the same pre- and post-patch. The xml file (or whatever they're using) is sitting there with a record of what video settings were used (otherwise it would not be able to populate the UI) that can simply be read rather than wiped. It really isn't a case of anything being hard-coded or a non-trivial issue that would require significant effort. If there is some hidden difficulty then I'm completely stumped to think what it could be (based on both coding and using many, many 3D engines in the past 15 years).

The Forza 6: Apex patches consistently wiped Video settings (but not Audio or Control ones, only Video where they pushed everyone back to Dynamic defaults with each update) the same way. They really don't have to wipe it, which is why I can't understand why they do it unless they expect everyone to run it Dynamic all the time.

Here's the source data they're not importing after the patch:

<ResolutionWidth value="2560"/>

<ResolutionHeight value="1440"/>

<Fullscreen value="1"/>

<ShowFPS isDynamic="0" dynamicValue="Default" name="Default" value="1"/>

<UseDynamicOptimization value="0"/>