Nearly a year since its release, Forza Horizon 5 is about to become even more of a technical showcase for PC players. Playground Games has formally announced that in a forthcoming update scheduled for November 8, the game will be outfitted with support for both NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution and AMD FSR 2. The update will also include additional DirectX ray tracing support, which you will be able to activate in Forza Horizon 5‘s Free Roam, Races, and Photo Mode.
All of these new graphical enhancements will come alongside some new free content. The Donut Media update will introduce a new Horizon Story and four additional vehicles.
Power to the pistons
With these enhancements, players can expect a richer visual experience across the board. For those that use the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 2) option, it sports a Performance mode that “can construct a 4K rendered image from a 1080p frame buffer, allowing higher performance at higher resolutions.” The neat thing about FSR is that it’s not exclusive to only AMD cards. Even if you own an Nvidia card, or even a new Intel rig, FSR 2 will be available to you in Forza Horizon 5.
For those who do have an Nvidia RTX card, however, you’ll get the exclusive benefits of DLSS support. It works much like FSR, so the same ability of producing a higher quality image with a higher framerate is present. Additionally, there’s DLAA mode that “uses AI-powered technology to anti-alias a native resolution at high quality,” thus producing a much smoother-looking final output image.
Screenshot by PC Invasion
Similarly, Asobo Studios recently outfitted FSR and DLSS support to Microsoft Flight Simulator. In our performance analysis that was done using a modestly powered gaming laptop with an RTX 2060 GPU, the results were average. It will be interesting to see what gains Forza Horizon 5 will have, especially considering it’s a much easier game to run than Microsoft Flight Simulator.
In addition to these new rendering options, there are also new options for ray tracing support. Ray tracing has been in Forza Horizon 5 since launch, but it has been regulated exclusively to the Forzavista mode, which is where you pan the camera around the car in the garage and interact with different elements like opening the doors and going into the interior.
The models used in Forzavista are slightly more higher quality than in regular gameplay. Additionally, there’s nothing else going on, so it made sense why this is the only area where ray tracing could be activated. But now, Playground has figured out an efficient way to implement it into other parts of the gameplay.
Ray-traced racers
As shown by the chart below, players can select what level of ray tracing they’d like to implement. The “Medium” preset simply allows for a lower-res production that only applies in Forzavista mode. “High” will unlock the full resolution, but also still keeping it in Forzavista. The new “Ultra” and “Extreme” options will allow you to see ray tracing in regular gameplay, with Photo Mode offering the highest fidelity as it’ll also apply to AI vehicles and not just your own.
Image via Playground Games/Microsoft
Playground recommends that users have at least a Ryzen 7 3800XT or Intel i7 10700K CPU paired with a Radeon RX 6800 XT or Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU in order to properly handle the “Extreme” ray tracing preset, all along with 16GB of RAM and an SSD. The full chart of recommended specs is below.
Image via Playground Games/Microsoft
As mentioned before, all of these upgrades will come to Forza Horizon 5 on PC on November 8.
