It's the tech interview we've been chasing down for a while now - especially in the wake of that superb playable demo, released a few weeks back. Forza Horizon 2 improves on the raw, unadulterated fun of its predecessor - an intoxicating fusion of arcade-style gameplay based on the intricate Forza Motorsport simulation - and melds it with some of the most impressive rendering technology yet seen on the eighth generation of games consoles.

We've interviewed developer Playground Games before of course, when the original Forza Horizon debuted towards the end of the Xbox 360's lifecycle. It remains a remarkable story - the creation of a brand new studio located thousands of miles away from the Forza development mother base, immediately handed the keys to one of the most valuable franchises in console gaming. It was a calculated gamble by Microsoft and Turn 10, yielding instantly impressive results.

The story this time is very different. There's a sense of confidence and accomplishment about this new Forza sequel. Playground Games is established, and it has the benefit of handing in its first Xbox One title almost a full year after the hardware shipped, while also benefiting from experience with the platform inherited from Turn 10. And that's where our interview begins.

Many thanks to Playground's Alan Roberts (technical director), Matt Craven (chief engineer), Andy Sage (lead rendering engineer) and John Longcroft-Neal (senior rendering engineer) for indulging us with this avalanche of technical info.

Digital Foundry: Let's talk timelines. There's a gap of sorts between the release of Forza Horizon on 360 and the release of dev hardware based on final XO silicon - how did this impact your pre-production?

Alan Roberts: When making our initial plans it was certainly fairly tricky to assess exactly where we'd end up from a performance standpoint. However, we were working closely with the Turn 10 team and had early access to a lot of platform information so we could extrapolate to a fair degree of accuracy where we would end up.

We created a whole bunch of calculations to estimate final hardware performance and some benchmark assets. As each new hardware and software revision became available we tested our assumptions and began to outline our budgets. The upshot of this was that we were not exactly settled on our final processes and budgets like we would have been had we created a same-platform sequel, but our pre-production estimates were very close.

This is all part of the fun of working with cutting-edge technology, and makes big-budget game development challenging and interesting.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings A totally rock solid performance analysis test on the release version of Forza Horizon 2 - it's a totally consistent 30fps from start to finish. Find out how it was done further on in this interview.

Digital Foundry: What was your assessment of the Xbox One hardware when you first got your hands on it, and to what extent could you tap into Turn 10's experience with the kit?

Alan Roberts: It was clearly a generational leap from the Xbox 360, both in terms of power and the feature set. It was very obvious right away that we'd be able to make a great game and realise lots of the ambitions we had. You can see just how much of an improvement the game is from the original in every area, and the hardware is a big part of that.

We gained a good amount of early experience of the kit by working with Turn 10 on Forza Motorsport 5. They were preparing to ship the game at the time, so this gave us insight of how shipping a game would vary compared to Xbox 360, which was very useful to our own pre-production planning.

Digital Foundry: In terms of raw tech from Turn 10, are you locked into the FM5 codebase or do you get to play with - and perhaps incorporate - some of its latest tech?

Alan Roberts: Right from the start we looked to what the Turn 10 guys were doing with FM5 and took full advantage of the great work they did to move onto a new hardware generation. We continually integrated their tech until they finished FM5 so we could continue to benefit from the optimisations and bug fixes they had worked on. There is a lot of bespoke work required to turn a Motorsport title into a Horizon title, but the engine is a really solid foundation that both teams continue to enhance and build on together.

Digital Foundry: The Horizon template was firmly defined with the excellent Xbox 360 debut, but the sequel obviously introduces a big bunch of major improvements. Was there a balancing act of sorts between the scale and scope of your ambitions and the capabilities of the hardware?

Alan Roberts: We've implemented a feature set that we're really proud of. We sat down once we started Horizon 2 and figured out how the hardware and platform could be exploited in each area. Once you start off with that mind-set some great features start to emerge and it becomes more about how to find time to implement them all.

For example, we wanted to make access to online seamless and instant, eliminating traditional lobbies. This touched most areas of the tech base and needed some careful planning to implement it within our project constraints.

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Digital Foundry: Was a truly open world always a part of the plan? Looking back to the original Horizon, the roadside boundaries do feel rather constrictive bearing in mind the nature of the world you constructed.

Alan Roberts: Horizon has always been about open world, but we've been able to push it further this time around. The new console and our experience from the previous game have really helped us open out the world in a way that makes sense. On Xbox 360 there were a few technical factors that made it difficult to open the world out in quite the way we wanted without sacrificing quality elsewhere, so we made a deliberate choice. These factors are now gone on Xbox One and the extra sense of freedom is great as a result.

Digital Foundry: Are we essentially looking at the same Forza simulation system as that found in FM5? Or did the open world and various terrain types and weather systems necessitate enhancing the existing tech?

Matt Craven: We run the same physics engine that can be found in FM5, so it has all the same depth and sophistication. Our handling model is designed to be more forgiving and our car handling designers do an excellent job of setting up the cars to ensure that driving around our world is a fun experience. With the addition of dynamic weather we had to make some changes to enable the player to feel a change in handling when driving in the wet, but we still kept it accessible and fun.

Digital Foundry: Would the Xbox One's hardware tiled resources be a good match for an open world in terms of virtual texturing? Is that an approach you considered?

Andy Sage: We considered using this approach during pre-production, but decided that it would be too restrictive given our world size and limitations given the amount of data that can be put on the physical media. In the end we feel that the approach we took was a better fit for the project, allowing highly detailed and varied texturing, with massive vistas across the open world.

Digital Foundry: If we look at the components in Xbox One, everything sees a generational leap - aside from the hard drive. Did this pose any significant challenges bearing in mind the richness of your open world?

Matt Craven: We were already used to streaming the world in Horizon from DVD, so the fact we're now streaming from HDD was a huge benefit to us as the bandwidth available to the game is much higher. Of course our asset sizes have increased significantly since the previous generation, but we already had the tools in place to duplicate data and optimise streaming bandwidth to a specific target. Having a HDD as standard in the box was a huge win for us.

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Digital Foundry: So you've got 5GB of free space on Xbox One compared to around 480MB on Xbox 360 - over ten times the space. How did you utilise it?

Andy Sage: Most of the extra memory goes into increasing the quality level of the assets and coping with the larger and more detailed world this time around. Texture fidelity has to be much higher at 1080p, and in addition we have many more complex materials that require extra textures compared to Xbox 360. For instance, due to using physically-based rendering, a large portion of our environment materials have independent reflectivity and roughness control via texture maps, allowing the artists complete flexibility. In addition, extra memory goes on more complex model geometry and higher model density.

Digital Foundry: Many of the major 'next-gen' titles have embraced physically-based rendering - can you talk us through your approach?

Andy Sage: We inherited a great starting point with the engine from Turn 10, which incorporated PBR from the outset. We took this and identified the areas that we'd need to develop for the new features used in Horizon 2, and aimed to keep the same level of consistency and fidelity used from that engine but transferred into the new dynamic time of day and open world scenario. This had several major impacts on the project, both in terms of asset production and system development. On the asset side, we had to bring everyone on the art team up to speed on the changes in the authoring process required compared to previous non-PBR production.

In terms of system development, we continued the attention to physically-based rendering into all of the new features that we developed for Horizon 2. For instance, this involved simulating the physical interaction of water with the materials used in the game to support our weather features. We also took a physically based approach to features such as the sky simulation, which accurately models the interaction of light with particles in the atmosphere to produce realistic results.

Digital Foundry: Does this have any impact on the creation of assets - such as cars and environments? The move to PBR has radically altered the workflow for artists, for example.

Andy Sage: Definitely, and this was an area that proved challenging due to the volume of assets that required producing and making sure that there was a high level of consistency in all areas. We're fortunate in having a great level of sharing with Turn 10, particularly as far as the car assets are concerned. The environment assets required a much higher level of workflow change, which was exacerbated by the quality changes required when going from the Xbox 360 to Xbox One.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings While Forza Horizon 2 is a true Xbox One showcase, a version of the game is also available on the veteran Xbox 360. In this special report, we check out the two releases and find two very different propositions.

Digital Foundry: Assuming a commonality in car creation between Motorsport and Horizon, is there a problem with the same - or very similar assets - needing to service two different renderers?

Andy Sage: In some ways the opposite is true. Having a set of great-looking initial assets allows us to have a baseline for our rendering setup even though the feature sets are different between the two games. That said, we do have a specific feature set for Horizon that requires bespoke work on each car, for example to support wet weather and night lighting setup, which requires additional resource, particularly in terms of tools and pipeline setup.

Digital Foundry: You're first to ship a console game with Forward+ rendering - what is it and what specific advantages does it bring to the table?

John Longcroft-Neal: The Forward+ technique we use is probably better described as 'Clustered Forward+'. All Forward+ techniques revolve around splitting up the screen into a regular grid of sub-rectangles (typically 32x32 pixels), then finding out which lights potentially effect each sub-rectangle before you start rendering. During surface shading, you load up the reduced light list for that sub-rectangle and process only those lights. The goal is to avoid processing lights that have no effect on the surfaces in the sub-rectangle.

The standard Forward+ technique uses a depth texture of the scene to cull lights from the list. There are two issues with this approach; firstly you need to render the depth texture as a pre-pass before the main scene in order to create the light lists; secondly semi-transparent surfaces cannot render to the depth pre-pass.

Clustered Forward+ avoids the need for a depth pre-pass altogether by calculating light lists at multiple depths for each sub-rectangle and using the most appropriate cluster during surface shading. We generate the light cluster data all on the GPU using Compute shaders and this is done for any rendered view that requires lights.

The advantage of Forward+ for us is that it just works with MSAA, at any level, whereas deferred techniques struggle to maintain decent anti-aliasing. Secondly you get the other benefits of forward shading such as allowing complex material types such as carbon fibre and car paint that are difficult to achieve using deferred techniques. We found that we could easily 'plug-in' Forward+ to the existing shaders which were already designed for forward rendering. The advantages of the Clustered approach to Forward+ for us were that semi-transparent surfaces did not need special consideration and most importantly we did not need to render a depth pre-pass.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Playground uses a form of rendering known as Forward+, allowing for a vast amount of dynamic light sources without some of the compromises found in more traditional deferred rendering. It's also utilised in the forthcoming PS4 title, The Order: 1866, but the principles were first showcased in the AMD 'Leo' demo, created two years ago. In this video, the nuts and bolts of the innovative lighting system are revealed.

Digital Foundry: Perhaps the biggest surprise for us is the inclusion of 4x MSAA in Horizon 2 in an era where any form of multi-sampling is on the endangered list. There's the perception - rightly or wrongly - that bandwidth is at a premium in both of the new consoles and resources are better spent elsewhere. What's your secret?

Andy Sage: It does seem sometimes that we are going in a different direction to the majority of games that are pushing for deferred rendering with FXAA or other combined anti-aliasing approaches. For us, image quality is highly important, and we found that we can achieve that best with the benefits of Forward+ lighting combined with MSAA. In terms of resource allocation, this is factored in during the planning phase of the project to make sure we spend the right amount of time balancing the cost versus quality trade-offs involved. In some respects this decision gives us more flexibility, as we don't have to spend time investing in custom anti-aliasing solutions as some other approaches might require.

Digital Foundry: You seem to be using alpha-test on foliage - with MSAA in play, wouldn't alpha to coverage have been a better fit?

Alan Roberts: We use alpha to coverage on grass, but this comes with a performance trade-off that means that it runs full execution of the pixel shader before Z test. Due to the density of foliage that we were aiming for and the fact that we had a much more consistent lighting model across all of the shaders used in the game, we decided that alpha testing for some foliage types was a better use of resources.

Digital Foundry: Being an AMD GPU, you should have access to EQAA modes too - did you assess them for Forza Horizon 2?

Andy Sage: We were actually running with EQAA for a large part of the project, but we found that our best cost/quality trade-off was firmly with 4x MSAA. Due to the way the GPU compresses the MSAA data, it's usually not 4x the bandwidth for 4x MSAA, and with a forward-only rendering path, the GPU is rarely bottlenecked by bandwidth, especially if the majority of the render target data is in ESRAM. We found that EQAA with a lower number of depth samples than 4x MSAA improves performance, but also lowers image quality because the hardware can't properly resolve certain polygon edge configurations. In a racing game, where the focal point is often in the mid to far distance, this difference can be crucial.

Digital Foundry: 1080p, MSAA - already we're talking about a considerable ESRAM challenge - what was your approach to memory management?

Andy Sage: We scheduled specific optimisation phases during the project development, where we looked at improvements that would allow us to achieve the solid 30fps that we were aiming for. We analysed ESRAM usage during each of these phases and determined what gains could be made, in particular optimising which render targets were in ESRAM throughout the frame. This involved careful analysis of which targets were required at which point in the frame to allow us to maximise the amount of ESRAM resident resources at any one time. It was also necessary to have a good understanding of what the bottlenecks were for each rendering stage so we could target ESRAM optimisations for systems that benefited from the additional bandwidth. ESRAM is pretty easy to manage, mainly because you don't need to resolve textures to read them and you can make textures partially resident.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings The concept of the playable demo seems to be on the verge of extinction - the arrival of a Forza Horizon 2 sampler was very welcome indeed. Here's our performance analysis.

Digital Foundry: What were the technical challenges of incorporating the weather systems and how did you overcome them?

Andy Sage: The main issue was that at any time the environment could become wet. This meant that we had to incorporate the concept of wetness into our physically-based rendering solution. So all of our materials have the ability to have a thin film of water applied on top so as to bounce light as a real wet surface would. We also had to create systems that could control the underlying shading model in a realistic manner depending on the environment state and evolve this over time (for instance, with the same level of surface water, the visuals have to look different depending on whether they are getting wetter or drying out, as this is what happens in the real world).

Additionally, we had to spend a lot of time implementing a real time reflection system to allow the light to be reflected accurately on these wet surfaces. As we knew that wet weather was a big feature for the game, we made sure we addressed these systems during pre-production to determine the best approach in each case, and to allow us to more accurately define where the frame-time would be spent.

Digital Foundry: Before you formed Playground Games, you produced some good multi-platform work. To what extent does working for a single platform liberate you and allow for better results?

Alan Roberts: It's surprising how much time is needed in day-to-day work to keep multiple platforms compiling, running and at the same time trying to push boundaries on each. Additionally, most of the work estimates have to go up slightly and some features need to be implemented more than once to play to the strengths of each platform. In some cases you would have to settle for an inferior approach that works on all platforms due to time constraints.

Working on a single platform takes all of those worries away. Your feature list can get longer and this makes designers and artists much happier! Having your engineers code right down to the hardware is great too. We're able to really leverage the platform in ways that would be difficult without that focus. Our use of cloud computing is a really good example of that.

Digital Foundry: You've previously talked about how turning on the Drivatar system changed the gameplay in an instant - did the system just plug into your existing code or did it require customisation to work in what is a very different game?

Matt Craven: Bringing Drivatar technology across from FM5 meant it was simple for us to activate it for Horizon 2. Once we did this and the team trained up their Drivatars we saw an instant change to the behaviour of the opponents - our races suddenly felt more alive. We then enhanced the system to handle the open-world environment, so Drivatars could drive off-road and take short-cuts. The first time I saw a Drivatar leave the road and head cross-country was a magical moment for me.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Playground Games' Xbox 360 work lives on, even though the developer itself has moved onto Xbox One. Forza Horizon 2 - developed by UK studio Sumo Digital - owes much to the existing last-gen engine work.

Digital Foundry: Have you made any changes or enhancements to the way it works based on community feedback - it turned out to be something of a Marmite feature for many in FM5.

Matt Craven: The Drivatars system continues to evolve and has done since the launch of FM5. The FM5 team have updated the systems post-launch and Drivatars continue to learn. The Drivatars in FM5 today, both individually and as a system, drive very differently than they did in the first several months. Thanks to sharing this technology across both games we were able to bring your FM5 Drivatar (and those of your friends) into Horizon 2 at launch.

Digital Foundry: Similar to the original Horizon on Xbox 360, you're aiming for a totally locked 30fps in the sequel. But that's just the rendering - what are the refresh rates of the underlying simulation?

Matt Craven: The simulation runs at 360Hz so we maintain the same level of detail as found in FM5.

Digital Foundry: There've been successful approaches in minimising input lag and overall latency in 30fps racers in the past - Criterion's approach in Need for Speed Hot Pursuit for example - how did you attack this?

Matt Craven: We had good experience to draw on from Horizon for this. We keep the controller input and physics calculations as late as possible in the frame in order to minimise the lag. We also run the audio on a separate core and keep that as closely in sync with the rendering as we can in order to help reduce the perception of lag.

Digital Foundry: Can you give us an insight into the stress-testing you carry out in order to assure a rock-solid frame-rate?

Matt Craven: Microsoft have a dedicated team in Reading who created numerous automated stress-tests which could test and report on performance across the whole world. Using a bank of kits they were able to profile the whole environment every day and give us immediate feedback on areas of the world that weren't in budget. Our tools allow us to reproduce the exact scenario they tested and investigate the issue quickly.

Andy Sage: As this is extremely important to us, we spend a lot of resources ensuring that systems are in place to monitor, assess, and feedback performance information to the relevant team members. Initially this begins with making sure that we can automate almost all aspects of the game to run stress-testing scenarios without human interaction. We then make sure that these automated systems comprehensively cover all scenarios that the user will encounter when playing the game, paying particular attention to worst cases. These systems are then continuously run on dedicated servers to produce up-to-date information on the performance of the game during development. The final stage is presenting this information in a way that is accessible to all of the team members involved so that they can take the necessary action to make sure that the given budgets are met at all times.

Digital Foundry: Demos are very thin on the ground these days. What was the purpose of producing one for Forza Horizon 2? Was testing multiplayer infrastructure part of the reasoning?

Alan Roberts: We actually made the demo for more traditional reasons. We believed that we'd made a really great game and we wanted to put the game in people's hands so they could get excited about it. We wanted to make a really generous demo, including online and social features, so people could get a taste of the full experience. We were absolutely bowled over by the response we got from it and we're seeing that carry through to the full game, which is hugely rewarding for everyone on the team.

Digital Foundry: Looking back at Forza Horizon 2 now the game has shipped, what elements are you most proud of?

Matt Craven: The freedom the game gives you, not just in where you drive but what you do - there's so much choice for the player at any given moment.

Alan Roberts: For me it is seeing the sheer amount of amazing stuff the community are able to do with the game. Some of that really takes the dev team by surprise. The photography thread on NeoGAF has some simply stunning shots on it. And you never quite know what cool things you are going to find people doing if you join an Online Free Roam session.