After its late-February tease, Microsoft Studios and Turn 10 are finally ready to unleash the Forza Motorsport racing series on PCs—and as we reported at the game's reveal event, it's coming in an unusual way. Forza Motorsport 6 Apex will launch exclusively on Windows 10 PCs on Thursday, May 5, in the form of a free "open beta" downloadable from the Windows Store. Based on our early Apex impressions, PC players are essentially getting a limited trial version of last year's Xbox One racer as opposed to a particularly new experience.

Having seen Forza 6 Apex in the flesh, we know the game will be a huge conversation starter for PC gamers for many reasons. For one, if high-end PC owners can replicate the 4K-resolution, 60-frames-per-second performance that we saw on Turn 10's monstrous test rig, they'll be in for the most incredible public demo of DirectX 12 technology yet released. Forza 6 Apex's real-time demo looked incredible, as that silky-smooth refresh rate faced zero stutters while rendering giant textures and gorgeous lighting effects.













On the other hand, it remains to be seen exactly how well Apex will scale on weaker PCs; Turn 10 currently recommends at least a 3.7Ghz i3 processor and 2GB of VRAM. Also, since the game is tied to the beleaguered Universal Windows Platform (UWP), users may once more face issues like the inability to disable v-sync and a forced borderless, full-screen mode.

PC racing purists may also be in for a rude awakening in the form of incredibly limited support for expensive racing-wheel sets. Turn 10 all but confirmed that we should expect support for keyboard-and-mouse and Xbox gamepads from the game's launch version... and that's it. Thanks to UWP, users will not be able to mod the game's INI files to enable their own steering wheels or pedals. Instead, they'll have to wait for Turn 10's vaguely promised "wheel support" to come.

Plus, the game is launching as a free download with a pay-to-unlock structure—meaning, you can unlock content by completing in-game objectives, or get specific cars and other content sooner by paying real-world money for in-game coins. Such a structure would possibly make sense for a full-fledged version of Forza but less so for one that comes with "over 60" cars and only six racetracks. That's a far cry from the hundreds of cars and dozens of tracks in a normal, retail version of the series. Microtransactions will simply force players to slam into Apex's wall of content limits sooner.

Ultimately, we're getting what we pay for, and the open beta's wide availability will give DirectX 12 its broadest testing base yet. Expect Ars to offer nitty-gritty analysis of its performance on various systems once the beta launches next week.