Microsoft Forza Motorsport - Information Thread, update: Digital Foundry PC version technical review

[AbsolutSurgen]

7 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

It’s kinda funny that the jump over the SX version is quite substantial but the gulf between high end pc and console is such that it’s not nearly enough since high end pc practically isn’t even in the same generation now.

 

Real shame it doesn’t have RTGI since they showed it off, but they do have somewhat of a history of adding pc features post launch so it could be coming. If they have concerns over cpu usage they should A) Use more than one core and B) add fsr3/dlss3 frame gen and problem solved. 

 

Not specifically stated but it sounds like this is a 60fps game and you shouldn’t try to run it at 120fps because of the multiplayer cap, the in-game forced vsync, and the cpu bottleneck. 

 

Beyond that it does look really nice and I’ll just pump up the image quality at 60fps.

I played a few minutes of it, and it does look good.  I'm kind of surprised about the 60fps cap, as racing games are the genre that high frame rates benefit the most.

 

I was disappointed at Alex's description of how poorly this game is optimized for multi-core.

 

My gut tells me that they spent very little time on the PC specific features, and I think you're right that they will be adding stuff going forward.  This is the kind of game that I will be probably playing a little ever week for the next couple of years, so as long as the fixes come in over time, I won't be too disappointed.

[Ominous]

I think DLAA / DLSS might be broken? 
Got the same performance with DLAA on and off. 

[Spork3245]

8 hours ago, Ominous said:

I think DLAA / DLSS might be broken? 
Got the same performance with DLAA on and off. 

According to Digital Foundry, you need to fully exit and restart the game when switching AA or DLSS settings or it breaks the game and also might reset some RT settings (that won’t show as changed until you fully reboot the game). I had the DF video on in the BG while cleaning, though, so maybe I misheard, but this happened with Forza Horizon 5 too iirc. They mentioned when switching from DLSS/DLAA to TAA that the performance was about the same but then they realized that RT reflections turned off on the cars after changing settings. There also seems to be a memory leak that starts when changing graphics settings unless you manually exit and restart the game (this mem leak when changing settings seems to be a super common thing now, lots of recent AAA titles have this)

[Ominous]

2 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

According to Digital Foundry, you need to fully exit and restart the game when switching AA or DLSS settings or it breaks the game and also might reset some RT settings (that won’t show as changed until you fully reboot the game). I had the DF video on in the BG while cleaning, though, so maybe I misheard, but this happened with Forza Horizon 5 too iirc. They mentioned when switching from DLSS/DLAA to TAA that the performance was about the same but then they realized that RT reflections turned off on the cars after changing settings. There also seems to be a memory leak that starts when changing graphics settings unless you manually exit and restart the game (this mem leak when changing settings seems to be a super common thing now, lots of recent AAA titles have this)

 

 

Seems like GPU use shows higher, but overall frame rate and frame times are nearly the same.

DLAA on after a fresh restart. 
I also had some things left on auto before and set them to the highest.
Seems a bit more demanding than FH5 or the lasr Motorsport game, but I don't really see a jump in fidelity. 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I've updated the reviews post.

 

 

[AlwaysDyingX]

I played a few races on my series X with my G920. I love the way the cars handle and the feel of the tracks. Graphically during gameplay it looks great but out in the menus and other areas it doesn't look so hot. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

So, I've completed several cups.  I am enjoying my time alot playing the game.  I'm not sure I agree with many of the decisions they have made, but that doesn't detract from how fun the basic driving is.  [My experience is based on turning off traction control, stability control, and all braking assists; but still keeping the braking line, standard steering and rewind.  I currently have the driveatars on level 4.]

 

Most "cups" involve buying a car, and using it over 5-6 races. [I haven't played enough to determine if you can use the same vehicle over several "cups".]  Each race begins with practice, where complete a minimum of 3 practice laps, followed by a race.  There is a bonus for beating a "target time" -- in my experience it is pretty easy to beat the target time by several seconds "most of the time".  For the race, you select your starting position; the further back you select, the bigger the bonus you get if you "podium" the race.  You then race 3-8 laps (perhaps more later on), and get points based on your final position.

My thoughts so far:

* As always, the driving in Forza games is a ton of fun

*  When you buy a car, you cannot make any meaningful upgrades.  Only by driving it in practice/races can you "earn" upgrades, so during your use in the cups, there is no point customizing it -- as each race you will upgrade it again.

*  The penalty system for crashing/going off track is very forgiving, while providing a real penalty for "bombing" into the AI cars

*  From race to race, your car may not be ideal for a specific track.  I have gone from lapping 4-6 seconds faster than the AI on one track, to only lapping 1 second faster on the next and being unable to catch up to the leader during the short race time.

I've only driven about 4 cups, so its still way to early to have a definitive view on "how good the game is".

[Biggie]

Ima download this but all I wanna play is Starfield 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Oh, I completely forgot about racing games’s love for putting you in last place and then giving you 3 laps to win against cars that should have very similar performance to your own. Man, did I get tired of that schtick in “motor sport” games. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 hour ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Oh, I completely forgot about racing games’s love for putting you in last place and then giving you 3 laps to win against cars that should have very similar performance to your own. Man, did I get tired of that schtick in “motor sport” games. 

In Forza Motorsport, you also have the option of turning up the Drivatar skill level and putting yourself in first.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

2 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

In Forza Motorsport, you also have the option of turning up the Drivatar skill level and putting yourself in first.

Id rather actual qualifying, but that’s not bad. Better than they’d done in the past at least. Is it just last or first, or can you select like starting in 3rd? 

[AbsolutSurgen]

26 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Id rather actual qualifying, but that’s not bad. Better than they’d done in the past at least. Is it just last or first, or can you select like starting in 3rd? 

At the beginning of every track, you have the option of changing the difficulty -- assists, drivatars, etc.  This is used to calculate the % bonus you get for rewards at the end of the race.

After you complete the practice, and before the race begins, you can select your starting position -- and you can pick any position you want.  This affects the "podium bonus" -- the lower you start, the higher the reward.

 

Most of my races are now in the 6-8 lap range.  One of the differences between Forza Motorsport and other racing games I've played, is that it analyzes each collision and each time you go off the track.  If it deems the collision "avoidable" or that you gained advantage through going off the track (eg. by cutting a chicane), it gives you a time penalty.  In previous games, when I was in second place, I would sometimes deliberately collide with the leader in a slow corner to pass them.  This is no longer a viable strategy, as the time penalty would cause you to still come in second place.  I haven't played multiplayer, but I assume that this would clean up a lot of the problems I've had in the past trying Forza multiplayer, where people strategically crash into each other.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

39 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

At the beginning of every track, you have the option of changing the difficulty -- assists, drivatars, etc.  This is used to calculate the % bonus you get for rewards at the end of the race.

After you complete the practice, and before the race begins, you can select your starting position -- and you can pick any position you want.  This affects the "podium bonus" -- the lower you start, the higher the reward.

 

Most of my races are now in the 6-8 lap range.  One of the differences between Forza Motorsport and other racing games I've played, is that it analyzes each collision and each time you go off the track.  If it deems the collision "avoidable" or that you gained advantage through going off the track (eg. by cutting a chicane), it gives you a time penalty.  In previous games, when I was in second place, I would sometimes deliberately collide with the leader in a slow corner to pass them.  This is no longer a viable strategy, as the time penalty would cause you to still come in second place.  I haven't played multiplayer, but I assume that this would clean up a lot of the problems I've had in the past trying Forza multiplayer, where people strategically crash into each other.

kind of FIA rules. That’s cool. How are they measuring “off track” or exceeding tracking limits? Is it just two wheels off the track, or do all four wheels need to be over the white line at the same time? 

[AbsolutSurgen]

2 hours ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

kind of FIA rules. That’s cool. How are they measuring “off track” or exceeding tracking limits? Is it just two wheels off the track, or do all four wheels need to be over the white line at the same time? 

Not exactly sure, for me, it usually has happened when I outbreak myself, get push wide when passing on a straight or cut a chicane - I’m usually very noticeably off track. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

1 hour ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Not exactly sure, for me, it usually has happened when I outbreak myself, get push wide when passing on a straight or cut a chicane - I’m usually very noticeably off track. 

in the past it was pretty harsh as to what counted as exceeding track limits. Far more strict than what actual racing regulations would allow. More like NFL rules than a racing governing body’s lol 

[Keyser_Soze]

Downloading now!

 

[SoberChef]

Man I need to get the hell outta work FAST (unfortunately have roughly another 9 hours to go) so I can FINALLY begin my career anew!

[Keyser_Soze]

Spent a pretty good chunk of time with this. That is to say the first two series which takes a long time surprisingly.

 

I know some people were annoyed by the mandatory practice laps but I think it's really necessary. Maybe it might be annoying later but these tracks offer a pretty hefty challenge, and sometimes hard to navigate as well, so you need those practice laps to work out the kinks before you get into a race.

 

I'm playing with minimal assists, ABS on and manual shifting, and play on expert rules with a drivatar difficulty of 4 and it's fairly challenging. Races are pretty intense at the beginning, a lot of big clumps of cars and the game forgives you on some collisions and veering off track. You can pick your place and you get a bonus for how high you can place. I usually go with 12 and can place most races. The computer is odd, sometimes you can catch them and stay ahead and other times they are just impossible to catch. Luckily it seems like the person who finishes first isn't always the same guy so you still have a chance to win the series. Sadly @The def star is the highest level I've seen (level 7) but has never come close to finishing even in the top 15. 😭

 

Somewhat related to the difficulty is the car XP. I think I enjoy the system. It makes things challenging early on since you can't pour tons of money into upgrades right up front but as things gradually go along (you can upgrade during a series) things get easier. The upgrades you can really notice the difference as well. I picked the Renault which felt a little squirrely early on but as I put upgrades into it the car started feeling really nice.

 

The graphics are very good. You can literally spend all day on a track. I started practice on a track during the afternoon, wrecked my car and went to the pit stop which takes a lot of time if you really screw up your car and then it was night time when I was back out racing. I think the weather might get worse as time goes on too in rainy races it feels a bit light at the beginning and then as the race goes on the storm gets a bit more intense. It's also pretty cool to see the pre race sequences of all the drivers hanging out by their cars before the race.

 

Finally, the anime skins are out in full force already. You love to see it.

 

I really wanted to get into this game since it's been a while since I've played a Forza game, I think Forza  6 was the last one I played and kind of fell off of it. But I'll probably come back to this one.

[best3444]

I'll dl this tonight and play a few lapse. I remember when Forza came out in 2017 and I was very impressed. I showed my gf at the time and she wasn't impressed in the slightest so that was embarrassing lol. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

With regards to "practice" [Again, I'm playing with manual shifting, no ABS, no traction control, no stability control].

I don't find that I "need practice" -- certainly not once I had done 3-4 races.  I am normally beating the target time by several seconds on my first lap.  However, due to the car leveling decision, if you DON'T do practice, you don't earn car levels that allow you to upgrade the car.  So if you skip practice, you will finish the cup with a barely upgraded car.  I really wish they had not buried upgrades behind a progression system.  It discourages tuning the car (as you will have different upgrades available for each successive race, making your previous tune obsolete) and hurts "learning your car" as performance characteristics change for each race.

I've been on Drivatar Level 4, and probably win 80-90% of my races (have never been lower than 2nd) -- usually starting 12th, though experimented with going lower.  The challenge with going lower, is that you risk getting stuck behind slow cars for too long, and having too big a time gap to overcome over such a short race.  Can it be done on some tracks?  Absolutely, but there are several tracks with limited passing opportunities (and you're not going to pass easily going through a series of S corners).

The other challenge with starting lower is the drivatars will occasionally cause a pileup going into turn 1, putting you further behind the leaders - and making it almost impossible to podium unless you are significantly quicker than your opponents.  And sometimes you can be, on some tracks I am 4-6 seconds per lap quicker than the leader, and others it can be as low as only 1 second.  I am assuming this is down to car selection, where the car I have selected is better/worse suited to the track I am racing vs. my opponents.

That said, I'm winning the "overall" standings in the cups pretty easily.

[Biggie]

What view do y’all use? With Gran Turismo I liked the bumper view but with this i think I enjoy inside the cockpit view. 

[Ominous]

38 minutes ago, Biggie said:

What view do y’all use? With Gran Turismo I liked the bumper view but with this i think I enjoy inside the cockpit view. 

Cockpit always 

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 hour ago, Biggie said:

What view do y’all use? With Gran Turismo I liked the bumper view but with this i think I enjoy inside the cockpit view. 

Cockpit.  Forza Horizon is Far Chase View, but this game is all about lap times...

[stepee]

The practice thing is fine it was just confusing me at first making me think I was not progressing or something. The game looks nice on pc maxed out at 60fps 4kdlaa but it really should run at 120fps easier.

The performance doesn’t make sense at all. DLSS seems just totally broken and doesn’t give any performance boost. It presents as a cpu bottleneck because you will see under utilization on the gpu even with dlaa on but the benchmark shows the cpu being fine.

 

And adjusting the resolution all the way down to 540p I then hit 120fps, and the gpu percentage is still high so it seems like it has to be a gpu bottleneck then. But there is no way to run it at 4k and use dlss to move the gpu burden down like it should.  By all accounts with how you can run with an extreme resolution scale, it should run fine with at least dlss performance at 120fps for me but it just…doesn’t.

 

It seems more than any particular metric affecting performance that the game is just arbitrarily sticking you with a certain frame rate and using your gpu to mine bitcoin. I mean, not really, but it’s very bizarre behavior that I haven’t seen in anything else I can think of.

 

Edit: And to note, all my testing was done with full application restarts between changing modes, so that isn’t the issue. 

[Spork3245]

22 minutes ago, stepee said:

The practice thing is fine it was just confusing me at first making me think I was not progressing or something. The game looks nice on pc maxed out at 60fps 4kdlaa but it really should run at 120fps easier.

The performance doesn’t make sense at all. DLSS seems just totally broken and doesn’t give any performance boost. It presents as a cpu bottleneck because you will see under utilization on the gpu even with dlaa on but the benchmark shows the cpu being fine.

 

And adjusting the resolution all the way down to 540p I then hit 120fps, and the gpu percentage is still high so it seems like it has to be a gpu bottleneck then. But there is no way to run it at 4k and use dlss to move the gpu burden down like it should.  By all accounts with how you can run with an extreme resolution scale, it should run fine with at least dlss performance at 120fps for me but it just…doesn’t.

 

It seems more than any particular metric affecting performance that the game is just arbitrarily sticking you with a certain frame rate and using your gpu to mine bitcoin. I mean, not really, but it’s very bizarre behavior that I haven’t seen in anything else I can think of.

 

Edit: And to note, all my testing was done with full application restarts between changing modes, so that isn’t the issue. 

I seem to get basically the same performance with 4k DLAA and 4k DLSS Quality. Also, I noticed that DLSS Quality seems more aliased than in other games.

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Spork3245 said:

I seem to get basically the same performance with 4k DLAA and 4k DLSS Quality. Also, I noticed that DLSS Quality seems more aliased than in other games.

 

I believe that any mode besides DLAA is just flat 4k AA off or something like that lol

[Spork3245]

3 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

I believe that any mode besides DLAA is just flat 4k AA off or something like that lol

You mean that DLSS is just not working? It would certainly make sense.  

[stepee]

6 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

You mean that DLSS is just not working? It would certainly make sense.  

 

Yeah not working except I think DLAA might be working right 

[AbsolutSurgen]

2 hours ago, stepee said:

The practice thing is fine it was just confusing me at first making me think I was not progressing or something. The game looks nice on pc maxed out at 60fps 4kdlaa but it really should run at 120fps easier.

The performance doesn’t make sense at all. DLSS seems just totally broken and doesn’t give any performance boost. It presents as a cpu bottleneck because you will see under utilization on the gpu even with dlaa on but the benchmark shows the cpu being fine.

 

And adjusting the resolution all the way down to 540p I then hit 120fps, and the gpu percentage is still high so it seems like it has to be a gpu bottleneck then. But there is no way to run it at 4k and use dlss to move the gpu burden down like it should.  By all accounts with how you can run with an extreme resolution scale, it should run fine with at least dlss performance at 120fps for me but it just…doesn’t.

 

It seems more than any particular metric affecting performance that the game is just arbitrarily sticking you with a certain frame rate and using your gpu to mine bitcoin. I mean, not really, but it’s very bizarre behavior that I haven’t seen in anything else I can think of.

 

Edit: And to note, all my testing was done with full application restarts between changing modes, so that isn’t the issue. 

I just think they didn't spend any time optimizing for non-Xbox.

[Biggie]

I think I like Forza 5 better. I mean Forza Motorsport is cool but it’s sort of straight forward like a sim. With Forza 5 it seemed more wacky and fun with a variety of races, characters, and cars. Is it just me?

[stepee]

46 minutes ago, Biggie said:

I think I like Forza 5 better. I mean Forza Motorsport is cool but it’s sort of straight forward like a sim. With Forza 5 it seemed more wacky and fun with a variety of races, characters, and cars. Is it just me?

 

Are you maybe thinking of Horizon 3?

[Biggie]

10 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

Are you maybe thinking of Horizon 3?

No it’s Forza 5 off of GamePass where you compete in the festival. 

[stepee]

Just now, Biggie said:

No it’s Forza 5 off of GamePass where you compete in the festival. 

 

That sounds like Forza Horizon :P

[Biggie]

1 minute ago, stepee said:

 

That sounds like Forza Horizon :P

Shit I don’t know. lol.  It was the first Forza I downloaded off of GamePass. I think it was Forza Horizon 5 ya. 

[stepee]

9 minutes ago, Biggie said:

Shit I don’t know. lol.  It was the first Forza I downloaded off of GamePass. I think it was Forza Horizon 5 ya. 

 

Yeah the Horizon games are all based around a festival. There are two Forza series, Forza Motorsport, and Forza Horzion - this would actually be Forza Motorsport 8. Horizon had its last one 3 years ago with Horizon 5. Turn 10 makes Motorsport (and the main engine) and then Playground makes the Horizon games. That one will be next and yes it’s a lot better.