Our Forza Horizon 3 game review from earlier this week took a long, hard look at Microsoft Studios' latest open-world racer. Short version: it's a damned good continuation of Forza's wilder half, and while its physics system felt looser and lighter under the wheel-controller hands of cars editor Jonathan Gitlin than he expected (even based on FH2, mind you), he still believed it deserved a spot at the top of the current open-world racer ecosystem.

We don't normally return to games after their releases to analyze performance, and certainly not only three days after a review publishes, but FH3 just so happens to be the first PC racing game sold by Microsoft in... gosh, 16 years! The company's last retail PC racer was 2000's Motocross Madness 2, while this year's sim-minded Forza Motorsport 6 Apex doesn't count because it was an experimental freebie—albeit an amazing and surprising one, at least in terms of performance.

That Apex release was probably easier to optimize for high-end PC performance, since it forced players to stick to specific racetracks (and could therefore limit on-screen elements like draw distance and geometry at any given moment). FH3, on the other hand, isn't just an open-world game; it's an outright romp that begs its players to kick up trails of dust, water droplets, and tree branches while competing against tons of AI-controlled opponents in no-rails races.

While we had earlier access to the game's Xbox One version—which sticks to a rock-solid 30 frames-per-second refresh in what appears to be full 1080p resolution, or at least something very close to it—the developers at Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios withheld access to the Windows 10 version until after our review published. As with other games in the new "Xbox Play Anywhere" initiative, buying a digital copy of the game unlocks both platform versions, and, for many PC gamers, that means dreams of even better performance on PCs that exceed the Xbox One's 1.31-teraflop performance rating.

Getting caveats out of the way













To be clear: this is not a definitive guide to FH3's performance on Windows 10 systems (and FYI, Windows 10 is required to run this "UWP" application). I was the sole tester, since Ars' Jonathan Gitlin currently lacks a decent Windows rig. My testing PC includes an i7-4770K CPU (overclocked to 4.2 GHz, which is a particularly safe and stable OC thanks to the fan system in place), a GeForce GTX 980Ti video card (specifically, a factory-overclocked EVGA model), and 16GB of DDR3 RAM.

That system held up incredibly well when testing two other recent UWP freebies—Forza 6 Apex and Halo 5: Forge—at maximum settings in UHD resolution (meaning, 3840×2160 pixels), and it exceeds the "recommended" spec that Microsoft advertises for FH3. And, thanks to the overclock, at least the CPU's clock speed exceeds MS' recommendation of an i7-6700K processor, though that's obviously not the only performance factor. At the very least, we figured we could answer at least one question: what can PC gamers expect with a little more headroom beyond MS' recommended spec?

The PC version defaults to a locked 30fps refresh, which it actually selected for my system after telling me that it had "optimized" performance for my rig. I called hogwash and bully on that, as I prefer 60fps performance for twitchier, higher-speed games, so I unlocked the frame rate in the options menus (though my monitor of choice only renders at a maximum of 60fps, apologies to anybody with a 144Hz monitor in hand). The game also recommended "dynamic" settings, which downscale and reduce certain visual elements on the fly in order to boost visual performance. I started out by removing those dynamic boosts and revved the game up to maximum settings ("ultra") in 4K with an unlocked frame rate.

Before getting into my specific experiences, I thought I should point out a few perks in this Windows 10 version. For starters, switching from the Xbox One version to Windows 10 on a single Xbox Live account works very nicely; I was able to quit my campaign on one platform and pick it right back up on the other, so long as both were connected to the Internet whenever I started and quit my sessions. Also, loading times on the Windows 10 version were easily half those of Xbox One, if not less, and while I didn't have any hardware wheels to test, FH3 supports 14 pieces of PC-compatible hardware at launch. And if you like unlocked frame rates and custom screen resolutions and ratios, fear not: FH3 supports turning v-sync on and turning on ultra-wide screen ratios such as 21:9 (though we didn't test the latter on compatible hardware).

Testing in the Outback













My first 4K result: My frame rate hovered between the 30s and 40s with tons of screen-tearing (hello, unlocked frame rate). I decided to try that dynamic rendering system and turn settings down from "ultra" to "high," which earned me back about 10fps on average, landing somewhere between 40-50. I went back to the menus, switched the dynamic setting to "medium," and managed to find a 4K frame rate that was mostly smooth at 60, with occasional dips and hitches.

I could live with that to some extent, but the medium setting includes sub-XB1 settings in regard to shadow quality, foliage quality, and geometry pop-in, which the clarity of a 4K display makes all the more apparent. After returning to the "dynamic high" quality setting, I dropped the resolution to 1440p, at which point I started ripping the road at what was largely a 60-frames-per-second refresh, minus the occasional hitch.

At least, until I stumbled upon the exciting, challenging Water's Way Cross Country race event. FH3 includes dozens of specifically plotted "courses" on its giant Australia map, which players can trigger by driving near them (once they've been unlocked with the game's "popularity" point system). Starting a race resets the open-world setting and adds a lineup of offline, AI-controlled racers and a bunch of markers that must be driven through (this is how the game creates "courses" where no obvious roads may exist). Some of the courses see players going through city streets, while others send cars careening through open swaths of desert and farmland. Water's Way is situated in a boggy jungle environment, made up mostly of dirt roads, and it proved to throw a wrench into nearly every settings scenario.

It's hard to pin down exactly why. Performance would sometimes drop to the mid-30fps range as soon as a car landed in water and kicked up tons of splash-particle effects, but other times, that wouldn't faze my system one bit. Turning the camera around mid-race to look at cars behind me would sometimes introduce a stutter, but other times, it wouldn't. The most consistent performance-dropping variable was other cars. No matter how visual settings were tuned, this race's frame rate always went down when other off-road trucks were on-screen ahead of my truck. In all, I lost an average of 8 to 12 seconds from my average frame rate on this course.

Meanwhile, other random fluctuations appeared pretty consistently outside of this race event whenever I shot for 60-frames-per-second performance, and these seemed to come from a mix of sudden bursts of effects and geometry and the introduction of new AI-driven cars. If I wanted to enjoy FH3 anywhere near the rock-solid 60fps refresh that I got from Forza Apex 6 on Windows 10, I had only one option: 1080p resolution at "dynamic high" visual settings. This setting survived the Water's Way race more than any other, surpassing 1440p at "dynamic medium" and 4K at "dynamic low," and it also held up throughout the course of normal racing throughout the massive expanses of Forza's virtual Australia.

But that's not to say 1080p on "dynamic high" is a clear victory for PC gamers, at least in the PC version's launch state. Geometrical pop-in is still pretty severe in this preset, so I saw elements like houses magically appear in the game's house-loaded towns as I approached them, while elements such as trees would transform with richer-looking foliage once they were quite close to my car. What's more, I still saw out-of-nowhere hitches and stutters pretty frequently. These don't get in the way of a perfectly smooth racing experience, but they'd be more forgivable if I was pushing the edges of 4K rendering. A locked 1080p/60 shouldn't be this hard to come by on such a high-powered PC, especially after making the aforementioned visual sacrifices to get it.

(If you're wondering, I did dive down to 1080p resolution at the "dynamic low" setting and still saw those frame rate hitches on occasion, sometimes plunging down to 50fps. Yikes. Considering how awful textures and pop-ins look at that setting, I can only hope that's an easily resolvable bug fix.)

Removing the "dynamic" toggle never helped a particular preset, by the way, though it did open up more menus, thus letting me toy with specific settings (many of them required a full reboot to test). Of particular note: I noticed very little performance difference when changing the MSAA setting, while I struggled to find a particular setting that made a major performance difference from step to step. To that point, I also noticed that my GPU's performance meters often peaked at around 85-percent performance, according to my MSI Afterburner system-tracking app, even during moments when the frame rate noticeably hitched.

As a result, I get the feeling that the game's struggle to hit a consistent 60 FPS refresh may have to do with some CPU-bound processing issues—the very kinds we've been led to believe are easily cured by a good DirectX 12 implementation.

But if you can live with 30...

Conversely, locking the Windows 10 version at 30fps—well, by golly, it works. As in, I can jack up every setting to maximum, including a staggering 4K resolution, and run FH3 at 30fps without seeing a single dip or drag into sub-30 territory. This is interesting, because the 980Ti is expressly not advertised as a 4K-ready video card—at least, not compared to this year's wave of refreshed cards—and yet my 980Ti system careens at 4K resolution with a frame rate lock to 30 in place. The effects are not insubstantial, either, and the combination of 8X MSAA, highest-res textures, highest-density foliage, and material-based lighting systems really looks unbelievable on a 4K display.

Whichever Microsoft Studios team led on the PC build clearly had 30fps as a rendering priority, which we think misses the point of what gamers want out of a high-speed racing game—but there's also the weird fact that FH3's engine prefers four times the pixels but half the frame refresh target. It's a curious performance breakdown, to be sure, and part of me believes (or ignorantly hopes) that this boils down to a simple fix on Microsoft's side for whatever part of the rendering pipeline is dragging down the higher refresh.

A Microsoft Studios spokesperson confirmed that the specific hitching issue I noticed in some otherwise smooth scenarios has been replicated by the game's PC development team; "you can expect a game update to fix this issue in the near future," the representative told Ars. Those gains may not come from DirectX 12-related fixes, however, as the representative confirmed that this engine is already built on a DirectX 12 foundation.

But FH3 on PC, even in its current state, is still far more successful than the other major "Xbox Play Anywhere" game from this month, the ho-hum adventure ReCore . What's more, in some ways, it speaks to the kind of performance ceiling we should expect from Microsoft's first-party games from here on out. As in, superior to the Xbox One's spec.

We're officially in the "now-next-gen" conversation thanks to hardware like this November's PlayStation 4 Pro and the expected 2017 launch of a new, souped-up Xbox One console, currently dubbed Project Scorpio. Microsoft has already begun bragging that its Scorpio has more meat on its bones than the PS4 Pro, specifically in terms of announced performance and the ability to render "pure" 4K content (as opposed to the PS4 Pro's "checkerbox" rendering tricks).

This week, we've gotten Microsoft's first "pure 4K" Xbox game—meaning, a formal retail game with geometry, textures, and effects that shine in 4K (and an apparent aspiration to make the visuals pop at the expense of frame rate, just like its Xbox One sibling). Project Scorpio doesn't yet exist, but comparable hardware does, and FH3's phenomenal 30-frame-a-second performance is a pretty good money-where-the-mouth-is declaration of what level of performance we should expect from the company's next living room box.