Forza Horizon 4 PC Analysis: Complete Settings Guide + Xbox One X Comparisons! 

Playground games are the master in this genre.Really excited for their new project.

I would like to give Playground Games a round of applause for actually learning from the performance problems from the PC version of Horizon 3 and delivering a great port this time around.

I'm amazed at all of the work you've put into this video, thank you for all the info!

In short: Play the game on Ultra.

Excellent in-depth comparison. Great work! This mustive taken a painstakingly long amount of time looking for the smallest differences in detail. And ontop of that recommendations, not just the data.

I adore those deep analysis! This is what I always loved in DF, glad to see more and more of those in the past few months. Thanks for the hard work :)

Absolutely phenomenal work, Alex! I'm consistently impressed by the level of detail you go into on these performance analyses. You also just saved me about 1-2 hours of benchmarking and fiddling with settings, so I appreciate that!

Seems like a great PC version with some room for improvement in terms of bugs. Even though I play on Xbox, it is nice to see my fellow PC players get a worthy version to enjoy :)

Cool Guide : Got the PC edition today & at 1080p with high settings - just lowered shadows & set A.A. to Fxaa with my i7-2600 + 16gb + Gtx 1050 ti 🎮 for a Stable & Smooth GamePlay at 60 fps 🎧 Thanx 4 posting 🎥

Here's results with a "potato" PC: GTX 670 + Phenom II X6 1100T @ 3.3Ghz (six physical cores) 16Gb Ram ddr3 1866 Everything set to LOW: 10-28 fps The game seems to absolutely choke on 2gb vram. or at least i guess that's my bottleneck. it's 4x more demanding than FF XV, which my pc can confortably run at 60fps on low preset or 30-40fps at medium preset.

It's nice to hear the iconic Digital Foundry music underneath your narration for the first time. I'm glad you're on their crew!

Fantastic review Alex!! This must have taken a lot of time to go threw all the settings and benchmarks. Thank you!!!!!!

Background music (in order): Bjørn Lynne - New Tech Haven. Bjørn Lynne - Solar Winds Bjørn Lynne - Over Distant Shores Bjørn Lynne - Aurora Polaris Absolutely love Digital Foundry's soundtrack, it's so underrated!

Independent of which plataform you'll play, both looks just incredible. And both can have 60 FPS, which is a plus.

Thoroughly enjoyed the video and how you broke down performance changes with each setting. Very informative and entertaining.

OMG..This is one of the best technical analysis that i've ever seen. Amazing Work DF! Thanks

This is an amazing port

They have not yet fixed the biggest flaw... windows game store...

Alex, I appreciate this video so much. Thanks for the trouble you've went to finding out the impact of each setting. That was a ton of work, and all very well told and presented. Watched the whole thing. I've personally got a Ryzen 1700x and 1080 Ti so I am a little concerned about that systematic down tic you found in the benchmarks, however my target is 4k60, so thankfully it shouldn't impact me, and as you say, hopefully it's patched anyway. I also have several friends with RX480/580 cards who will appreciate the breakdown of the settings, I'm going to send them the link to the video. Thanks again.

This was very informative and very well structured, thanks Alex!

This video looks like about 30+ hours of work to me . . . great job!

Why isn't there ever a slider for render distance? Pop in is by far the worse thing, I'd put everything on low to reduce/stop pop in!

Please keep doing the "in-game settings" videos for big games. Very helpful!

Was so impressed with the demo I pre ordered it on PC. Great ultrawide support and was running at 100+ fps for me.

Good analysis, Alex. You even covered Ultrawide! One thing you missed was HDR support. I am happy to report that it is indeed supported on PC. If the demo is any indication, than this is indeed a great port. I was playing at a locked 60 FPS with the ultra preset at 4K60. What blew my mind was that the game supports HDR and Dolby Atmos on PC as well! So if you have a sick home theater pc setup, Forza Horizon 4 is gaming bliss! I am torn! I have been hovering over the buy button because I want to support fantastic PC ports like this. But, at the same time, I don’t want to support this horrible DLC VIP strategy that gives progression advantages to people who spend more money on the game. Coming off of games like Spider-Man, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and God of War, this just seems dirty. Damn you MICROSOFT!

7:35 "you still spend a lot of your time in glorioud english sunlight" HAHAHAHA sunlight... :D

thank you DF for this video, exactly what i was looking for to tune the gfrx for the game. More content like this plz!!

The amount of effort put into creating this video is impressive. Thanks DF :)

You can trun Chromatic Aberration off, it's just in the diiferent menu so you can turn it off on console too, I'd presume. Also there's been a lot of people noticing the awful LODs regardless of their setting, so it sure is that bugged static geometry setting. I really hope it gets fixed soon along with the Anisotropic Filtering.

Switching from console gaming to PC gaming was the best decision I've ever made!

wow we need more videos like this perfect formula for knowing whats important.. Soml much hard work for this video and its greatly appreciated

Very nice coverage. It's great to see so many options and the optimisation seems spot on.

Roll on midnight when the game unlocks:D

Amazing game all round. PC and XBOX together. That’s what it’s all about!! Guys. Gamers care less about the platform!, But the game itself 🙂. The game is amazing.

This vid took a lot of time. Thanks man. Subbed.

pls do settings guide like this for all games from now on :) great work!!!

Alex doesn't ever play games confirmed :D

How does a video have dislikes if the video is 30 minutes long and it's only been 10 minutes since it was uploaded.

no words, df you made an incredible work, well done

Excellent Analysis Alex. Keep up the great PC graphics analysis on DF.

Loving the pc focused content, keep up the good work DF. Ignore all the infuriated console peasants playing at sub optimal frame rate

Why in the world would they not allow Chromatic Abortion to be disabled?

Loved this video with all these details. Exactly what i was looking for.

This is exactly the kind of video about this game I want to see. Thanks!

Can someone recomend a nice setting for 60 fps for thegtx 1060 3 gig version and still get the one x visual ??

4k 60 Ultra on my 2080 easy...looks and plays great on X as well! Beautiful game!

awesome video! could be better if there is a summary of settings effects at the end! I sit through the entire 30mins and got my ideal setting!

This has been done so well, respect to the creative team behind Forza Horizon franchise

To run this game at ultra I need a 100% increase in money spent on my pc.

still drive club has better rain after so many years

This was one of the Best PC Analysis. This was very detail and informative and should be like that on all PC analysis. I loved how you compare mid range cards performance with CPU against the Xbox one X. Love PC gaming which is my platform of choice I cant wait for more MS exclusives and how well devs optimize games on windows. Thank you MS+playground games keep them coming

This is the video I've been looking for. Now I'm getting Forza.

so a GTX1060 gets you 40fps at 4K .. so a 1070 can get you to 60fps at 4K almost?

Easily the best-looking game I've ever seen. Those headlight shadows!

Thanks Alex for the In-Depth analysis.

Great Guide Alex, but i do have 1 main criticism. Explanation of each setting is great, and pointing out those bugs / oversights is super valuable for devs hopefully too, but just simply concluding on each option that the highest setting is best/recommended is a moot point. Those with the power to do so will just run Ultra anyway. Those who would get the most use out of this kind of video are here to find out where we can save most efficiently on systems that can't hit 60. In Future vids If possible I'd like to see you focus more on highlighting the best places to save frames, and/or places to save without ruining visual candy. Hope this is fair comment, keep up the good work.

So its been confirmed 1070/980ti>>>>>>>xbox one x 1060/rx580>xbox one x Most powerful console equivalent or slightly slower than mid range gpus, actually not bad for a 500$ box. But lack the customization possible to achieve how you want to play the game and of course the xbox one x cpu is still a huge limiting factor for most multiplatform games. Hope next gen consoles will have a more balanced hardware like ryzen 2 based cpu with navi gpu architecture that would be awesome

Pc , the best place to play xbox games ...

This video was amazing. Fantastic job.

Great Video. Thanks Alex!

*This video just proved that you dont need to go out and spend $1000 on a PC to play games. Just get an Xbox One X & basically get the same shit*

Alex in a nutshell Static Geometry looks better on X1X, But let’s just call. It “Ultra” because on PC Ultra and Extreme look the same. Can’t have Xbox winning anything X1X Screen reflections look like either Extreme or Ultra he can’t tell a difference. Let’s just call it Ultra to make X1X look a little worse SAAO looks identical and has no framerate impact from Medium to Ultra on PC. So let’s just call it Medium/High on X1X to make it look worse again

Cant wait for the "4K on a budget" video for this, those are great. Demo runs flawlessly on a ryzen 2200g + 1060-6gb at 1080p-60fps

This video is a perfect explanation why I play on Xbox One X. I get a set of settings that are already tuned to my exact hardware, with a couple major options (mainly 4k/30 or 2k/60) I can choose between. No crashes, and no needing to figure out what all these crazy options are and which ones I need to compromise on to get a good framerate versus good visuals. Yes, I don't get 60fps at 4k. But, in the end, I just don't care. It looks amazing and feels buttery smooth. I suspect the majority of people would agree. For the remaining people who want to put more work into it, I'm very happy there is a PC option that gives you all these settings to tweak. I certainly don't have any resentment or competition with PC players... other than that many of them seem to think everyone should be playing on PC because "it's the bestest" and can get higher framerates. I'm just stating that in my opinion and for myself, none of this is worth it when I can just fire up the X on my 60" TV and have a great experience nearly instantly with 90+% of the quality. THAT's the appeal of the X, or even the One for many people.

Praise Microsoft for doing this. Seeing FH4 in full glory of the power of the pc as we speak. Unlike selfish Sony games, which all are in 1440p/30FPS/medium/low settings, because of the pro is simple not power enough, to handle true/real 4K. So sad we can't see those game in full prime.

Sucks that the Xbox One X can't even do 1080p 60fps on many games with settings similar to PC's Ultra. There _has_ to be graphical compromises and the sacrificing of many gorgeous visual details. Its extremely weak CPU is a massive bottleneck. However, a PC with an RX 580 + i5 8500 can easily do 1080p at a locked 75 fps on ultra.

Wow I didn't know that when I failed a race the first time then went back after knowing the track and having more experience that it wasn't those factors helping me win, it was my PC getting faster!

Great video. The PC version is great save for the draw distance issues that you touched upon. I’m pulling over 60fps on the ultra preset (without dynamic optimization ) on my laptop with an i7 8750H and 1060 6GB.

MSAA 8x, rip framerates. Fxaa too? Yuck Taa killed MSAA years ago, it's really outdated they only have fxaa as an alternative

Pc the best place to play

Top work Alex.

Another amazing video! Thank you!!

xb1x best box

PS4 Pro was a rushed mistake.

This is why I love DF Amazing video

Man this is the best driving/racing game in a long time. Played it all morning and was blown away.

This game is BEAUTIFUL on my One X 💪 Sold My ps4 Pro. It's crap compared to the X.

I find it funny that so called xboxonex exclusives play better on another system.

Man, i imagine how much work this video took to be made. Just wish they uploaded it in 4k to skip a bit on compression and get more detail.

Props to your stamina, you must have run the benchmark a huge number of times :)

Pc the definitve version

Xbox one X all ultra settings unlike the pro, you get potato and soupy blurry textures

Amazing video explaining everthing.

Wow!! Great analysis!! Awesome job!

20:40 is what you came for. XB1X version starts to be discussed

Still the picture is not better than Drive Club (a 2014 year PS4 game). WHAT A SHAME!

Mighty impressive optimization on PC in this, especially cpu side. I was surprised how good the demo runs.

fantastic analysis!! thanks so much!

Play better in PC

Jesus, what a load of messing around!! I just wanna play games!! I would just rather play the game on the X! This is like buying a bag of crisps and someone going on about the ingredients on the back of the bag lol

Thanks for a great and helpful video. Hoping for a HDR on vs off comparison! And maybe a "4K guide" for us using a PC and a 4K (HDR) TV.. :D

Good video - Very informative

FH4 Looks and plays best on PC. Xbox One, S , X = inferior version PC = superior definitive version. I’m so glad this Microsoft published multiplat is NOT an Xbox one exclusive. Now I don’t have to settle for the inferior downgraded weIfare version on Xbox One consoles.

Amazing tech analysis

That benchmark reminds me of the new Shadow of the Tomb Raider, similar in nature... Similar in readout and detail. Very nice, the both of them.

Really glad for the nice PC port as i'm planning to play this on both my xbox and PC. Nice to be able to lay down in the bedroom and play as well as play at my desk when i'd like to.

Great vid. I run a 7700k and a 1060 6gb gpu. FH3 was smooth and clean so I am looking forward to seeing what this new version will do. Thx..

Tried the demo, on my RX 580 i managed 1440p ultra with a solid 60fps, pretty happy with that, will be getting it.

fantastic video

I know I'm kind of late for the party, but once you start playing multiplayer those %differences between options become bigger. For single player some settings work fine, but not for multiplayer, especially if you have mid to low-end GPU. Just my few cents. Keep up the good work, mates. Love ya :)