Despite the internet warning me about issues with the PC version of Forza Horizon 3, I decided to buy it anyway after my recent upgrade to a gtx 1080, especially since Jeff mentioned that on his newly built pc with a 1080 card he had managed to play at locked 60.

But no matter what I try, I seem to get nowhere near a locked framerate. The game goes from 80 to 40 constantly on ultra settings, making it almost unplayable for me. This gets especially bad near cities, but it still happens frequently enough when roaming about that I've only been able to play it locking it at 30 fps so far.

Am I missing something here? Do any of you manage to play it at a locked 60fps at 1080p?

Here are my specs:

• i7 4930k
• Palit Gamerock GTX 1080
• 32 gb ram
• Samsung 840 EVO 1tb SSD

Your CPU is almost certainly the issue. Even though the 4930k has 6 fast cores, FH3 tends to max out one core over the others and it'll bottleneck at 3.9 GHz pretty quickly. If you have a decent cooler, you could try overclocking your CPU to give you more headroom.

From my understanding not much can run it at constant 60, try dropping settings that may affect the cpu as well. It's a console port built around 30fps

Ah that kinda makes sense.

I'll try overclocking the cpu and report back, although I feel this reeeeeally shouldn't be necessary, but I suspect you're right in saying it was a console port built for 30fps.

I hope it's not a sign of things to come with this Windows 10/Xbox push though, 'cause that would really suck.

Sadly Forza is poorly optimized on the CPU front, throwing raw GPU power to it isn't going to do anything sadly.

@laethe: Gears 4 and KI seem fine.

I'd also imagine that FH3 will eventually be fine, too. Playground and Turn 10 have to support and expand the game for a while yet, and even just in the interests of getting the technology down for subsequent games they need to solve this.

Forza Horizon 3 will drop frames on any PC. That's just the way it is sadly. They improved things to make it more playable, but don't expect a solid 60 everytime.

Damn, they still haven't at least tried to fix this?

A 4930K is almost as high-end as it can get so its even worse if the game still lags even if you have such a beast of a computer.

Still hoping that they fix those problems.

@dray2k: They've pushed several patches with performance improvements already, albeit with mixed results. I wouldn't be surprised if I heard that more were coming.

@fnrslvr said:

Thats great to hear, though most people seem to still have dire problems as this thread indicates.

Reading up on the patchlogs does give me hope that they're actively trying to fix problems people have with it. Guess we just have to wait and stay positive.

EDIT: Somehow I've thought they would release one big patch instead of tackling issues step by step. Guess I got accustomed to devs concentrating on releasing big chunks of fixes and additions instead of a continious flow of small ones as some devs do. Nice to see big studios to do this also.

same but my fx8350 is to blame (i think)

So after a few tests it seems that @conmulligan was partially right in saying the CPU was bottlenecking my GPU to an extent.

After overclocking my CPU to 4.5 ghz, I have noticed some improvements, albeit limited ones, in framerate numbers and consistency, but I still struggle to keep a locked 60fps with frequent dips into the low 50s- high 40s when near cities.

Turning AA off completely seems to have almost no effect at all, and the same goes for V-sync and Dynamic optimization.

Needless to say I'm very disappointed that even with a system like mine it's impossible to play at a smooth 60fps at 1080p, especially considering that the game is beautiful but no more or less so than other driving games that run perfectly fine on PC.

That said, I'm confident that they will patch the game soon enough since the problems are so widespread, and in the meantime I'll keep playing locking the game at 30fps.

@andythemez: Two of the tricks that I found while searching for a fix were to change the priority of the process to high first and then low, and to disable all even number cpu cores if you have a cpu with Hyperthreading. You can do both by opening the Task manager, right-clicking on the Forza icon, selecting go to details, right-clicking on the forza process there and on that dropdown you'll find both options.

Neither of them made any noticeable difference in my case, but a lot of people seem to have fixed or improved their situation with these.

Quick update: turning off Motion blur almost completely fixed my problem, and I'm not locked at 60fps 90% of the time. Go figure.

As a CG artist, I find it super interesting that the cutting edge of gaming right now is how much they can push CPU usage, while the new hotness in rendering for animation and effects is GPU based. Traditionally those roles were reversed, where gaming is nearly all about GPU power and rendering for CG was all about raytracing, therefor CPU heavy.

That has nothing to do with Forza, sucks that it's not optimized for anything but a 6700k it seems, but just thought it was interesting.

@ragnar_mike: Unfortunately this game does the opposite of tax the CPU in general, it eats a core and then idles when compared to similar games.

While the consoles are using CPUs that have 8 cores but clock under half the frequency of PC CPUs and are far simpler (there are about half as many actual execution units that process calculation instructions inside each core so they can only do about half as much work at the same frequency) then there is no risk of games actually pushing CPU usage. It's exclusively an issue of bad engine design or bad ports that cause CPU-limited PC games.

Just like offline rendering, even more is being pushed onto the GPU today as more tasks are optimised for a very wide processor that works in waves (doing lots of the same calculation on the same data in parallel to batch through tasks) and (because real-time rendering cares about overheads far more than offline) technologies like DX12, Vulkan, Metal, etc are built to reduce the CPU load of managing those GPU tasks and dispatching rendering work to the GPU (by removing the driver/Os level management of GPU memory resources and states - that's now the responsibility of the application using the GPU to manage for itself).

I think it is a game made for 30fps like Mafia 3. That doesn't scale well on PC. Mafia 3 can't get 60fps on even the new Pascal based Titan X.

I know we PC gamers want more fps but this might be a game you should lock at 30 as it is on console.

Still it sucks that they cant optimize better. I just bought a GTX 1070 which is the most expensive card I've bought ever in 18 years of PC gaming and I expect to max out everything. If not even a 1080 can that is really bad.

I wish the 30fps cap worked consistently in Forza Horizon 3 for my system.

As it is, it felt like stop-motion while the framerate counter was reporting a solid 30. In the end it was clocking my CPU up to 5GHz to really maximise the single-thread performance that fixed FH3 on my system, basically locking it to 60fps (with priority: Low) until the first patch actually made it less consistent. Add in the totally unreported and unspecified requirement to be online to run the game at all (so DRM that requires internet connection to start playing they don't list on the store page) and it was time to cut my losses and get a refund. Hopefully by the time this is on sale, they'll have fixed all the issues.

The crack scene has discovered that Forza Horizon 3 has a ridiculous amount of DRM running on the game and this has increased CPU requirements above what is necessary. Forza actually encripts every file during installation, so when the gsme needs to access things like a car texture, the game needs to access the file, decrypt it, then load it into memory before it can be used. If it was coded properly, that wouldn't be as much of an issue, but since it isn't that extra decrypting step turns out to be a massive bottleneck.

Interesting! That's a huge bummer about the game. It's not like using one core is a new concept for gaming, you would think it would have been fairly sorted out by now, but new workflows do tend to muddle the mixture. If that DRM bloating issue is true, that's even more annoying as I do not know anyone who doesn't have at least a quad core these days and I'm sure, while super annoying to deal with, using more than one core would solve a lot of issues (and probably cause more than I'm not aware of.)

you know what'd really fix forza horizon though? if the cars could jump into giant robots and ride them and kill each other.

@monetarydread: like, actual encryption based on an actual computational hardness assumption, or just "this is encoded in some weird format that we don't understand"?

If the former, I just don't get how they could think that's a good idea. I mean, the technology to run a game on an untrusted client and keep the program state a secret from the user doesn't exist, and might be theoretically impossible (unless you want, like, a minute of input lag). If the right modders want your game assets, pretty much the only thing you can do to prevent them from getting them is stream your game from a remote location. If you encrypt your assets, your program has to have the codec on the untrusted machine, and has to get the key and use it on the untrusted machine, and modders can and will exploit that. If Microsoft is pushing for this, I can only imagine that experienced engineers are being shouted down by stuffy suits who know fuck all about complexity theory, which is sad.

On the other hand, modders didn't seem to run into anything cryptographic whilst extracting assets from KI (although they stopped short of getting their own assets back into KI). For that reason I figured the people at Microsoft weren't dumb enough to bog down their products with futile cryptographic lockdown attempts. I don't know, I guess I'll wait to hear more.

A google search turned up this interview. Apparently they're encrypting the assets using EFS, and indeed it's already been circumvented in more-or-less exactly the manner I was expecting. Choice quote:

Not sure why they went this route honestly. It is extremely easy to reverse engineer and poses no real block to cracking.

Me neither, dude.

I mean, I guess maybe they just underestimated the CPU overhead of decrypting and (especially) decompressing everything. I don't think hiding some directories and using off-the-shelf filesystem encryption is all that dramatic. (Although retrieving the key over the network on startup is shitty.) It mostly seems like a very passive, low-development-overhead attempt to protect things a little, not something that's expected to keep serious modders out at all. The substitution cipher on the filenames is really dumb, though.

That said, I'm not fully convinced that this is the sole cause of the performance issues.

@fnrslvr: Yeah I had read about that, and apparently the problem is not limited to Forza, Halo Forge uses EFS too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/54pisw/forza_horizon_3s_efs_data_encryption_has_been/

That's why I mentioned my worries about the Windows/Xbox push. Microsoft has a dreadful track record with gaming on PC (Games for Windows anyone?), and they didn't seem to have learned from their past mistakes.

@laethe: I don't know, I think they're just making a bunch of new mistakes.

Although thinking about it, if they were able to iron out these performance issues but otherwise leave this encryption stuff in place, none of it would bother me. It's just too ineffective and harmless to seem at all sinister. It's something the engineers probably did to placate the stuffy corporate suits who were wringing their hands about piracy or something, figuring it wasn't a big deal since filesystem-level encryption wouldn't get in their way. Even the key thing -- it sucks that it requires an internet connection, but I also think it's fair (if unfortunate), given the business models in place, for the game to make a check against your Microsoft account to ensure you're entitled to play the game.

Aside from that, I get that it's the fashion to point to GfWL and say Microsoft doesn't get PC gaming, but they do own the OS and they've maintained DirectX for the sake of high-end gaming for literally decades, which has to count for something. (And, I'd say, has to count for far more than Valve's contribution to the ecosystem.)

Also, I'm in agreement with at least a large chunk of the motivations behind UWP: that Win32 is an archaic mess of an application platform that is in serious need of standardization on multiple fronts, sandboxing, etc. to pass muster in the modern world. I expect UWP to go through a lot of teething issues if it's to accommodate all the stuff that falls under the umbrella of the moniker "Windows application", so most of the setbacks thus far don't bother me (there are a thousand things that UWP could've messed up but didn't that look like, say, forced vsync, so don't act like that's the first thing they should've thought of). I guess I'm hoping that Microsoft manages to pull this one off, because I think the vision for the future that they're pushing looks mostly great, and I'm not sure where else I'm going to go if it fails: I hate Apple with a passion, I think Ubuntu (the only Linux distro that's come close to tackling the immense requirements of a mass-market end user OS) is an unpleasant mess and I only stuck with it for as long as I did for the shell environment (which Win10 kinda has now -- god WSL is wild), Google's vision of doing all things on a web browser makes me ill, and I'm not one of these lunatics who thinks Windows 7 will be okay forever. If not Windows 10 and UWP, then what else? (Not a rhetorical question. I'm optimistic about Win10, but I'd really like to see an escape plan on the horizon that doesn't suck, and don't say Windows 7.)

gtx 1070 and a 4790k, playing unlocked at 1080p I am getting 70-120 fps everywhere EXCEPT the surfer city location. Then I get 50-60 fps.

I would lock it to 60, but the drops in the city are way less struttery when unlocked.

@fnrslvr: Oh don't get me wrong, I love that they're trying to unify the platforms and I'd be willing to put up with some issues at this initial stage, but the performance issues I've been having with this game have only been the tip of the iceberg for me.

For a start, the Windows store that they're forcing down our throats has a really bad UI, an almost useless search function, and displays several versions of the same game, some at the same price, which tricked me into buying a "bundle" version of Forza instead of the "standard" one that wasn't working, and I had to refund and repurchase the "standard" version of the game to get things right. Then, I tried installing the game on a different ssd then my OS one, which made the game stuck on the initial loading screen, and the only fix was to uninstall and reinstall on my main OS drive. This happened with Halo forge and Forza Apex too. All this wouldn't be too bad if you could just buy the games outside of the Store, but you obviously can't.

It's just too many missteps and they all seem to indicate to me an attempt to force a more "closed" approach to PC gaming than what we're used to (see the Minecraft store version as another example of this). If this is the price to pay for a unified platform, than I'm happier sticking with Steam and GOG.

@laethe: Hopefully soon we will see more exclusives come to steam like quantum break, cause right now just coming to pc isn't going to get me to buy anything from that windows store. The main issue being forced install on the c drive, i have an ssd as my os drive and use other drives for games so that doesn't work. Honestly only game i want to play still is sunset overdrive right now, which they probably won't even port over :-(

@oursin_360: all settings > system > storage to change where apps install

Of course, don't know if that works in this case, and annoying you cannot set that just for games at the moment.

Gears of War 4 proves that UWP games work, and work well. I believe Rise of the Tomb Raider was fine as well. Games like Forza Horizon 3 and Quantum Break are just bad PC ports, plain and simple. It has nothing to do with the fact that they're distributed through the Windows Store.

@budgietheii: Yeah, it all just seems unnecessarily cumbersome not unlike dealing with games for widows live. If microsoft ever gets off the whole "We need to control every thing about your computer use" then maybe they can get a good game service on pc. The whole "apps" thing annoys me a bit too for whatever reason, hopefully they get it together one day but i doubt it.

If only. Another bug in UWP.

Win32 might have needed an update but this isn't an update, it's a landgrab to turn Widows from the open ecosystem that has provided it with market dominance into a closed system with a single store. When you've got leads at Epic etc getting worried enough about this path to go public with their concern, it's not just internet conspiracy theories.

DirectX may be the primary 3D API but when you read about how MS abused every tool they had to get there (Alex St. John is a complete ass but has also recounted several interesting stories of when he was a MS hitman) and look at how that's barely been treading water to stay ahead (without Mantle and then Vulkan, would DX12 even be where it is today? How did Mantle get created if MS was on the ball?) - great example being this game not exactly showing off the multi-threaded dispatch and low CPU overheads of the API.

The best version of Rise of the Tomb Raider is still the Win32 Steam edition. Most features, most options, most access to the files you've paid to own a copy of and run on your own hardware without interference. A year of updates to UWP and still not even close to parity. Meanwhile, my GfW purchases from 2012 continue to get harder to access, showing how you should expect UWP games to go when MS give up on this as another failed project. Meanwhile my Steam games purchased digitally in 2007 continue to work just fine.

I can only offer my experience and specs to this discussion.
It took me weeks to actually be able to download the game, it was a hell of a process which i'll skip explaining but i have the game now, on to performance.
The vanilla version of the game did not work, it would crash at the developer logo video, the first patch got me past that issue and revealed the terrible optimisation of the game, it was a stuttering mess, my PC had no problems hitting 60fps but the jutter was insane. Given the Windows Store exclusivity of the game i've lost track of how many patches there have been, but the most recent optimisations have been really great, now the game runs at a solid 60fps for me at ultra settings with v-sync on at 1920x1080, from what i understand it used a single core of your CPU at launch, but the patches have enabled the use of multiple cores.
And that's what it comes down to it seems, the CPU, i have an i7-6700K, 32GB RAM and a GTX980ti, so while you have a better gfx card than me, it seems your CPU is likely the cause of your performance.

An update in October touted "Players running four-core setups should see CPU improvements" and "Improved thread layout changes for eight-core setups", if those updates don't also improve how your 6 core handles it then hopefully there's still an update coming which will.