Forza Horizon 5 Performance Analysis

Forza Horizon 5 is a major success for Xbox Game Studios in particular and open-world racing games in general. The title received rave reviews. Forza Horizon 5 looks astonishingly good. In some instances, it looks downright photorealistic. It bears a lot of resemblance to Microsoft Flight Simulator in that regard.

In all respects, the visuals of Horizon 5 are on the highest level. At high to maximum settings, the textures and effects (water, smoke, …) look mighty impressive. The reflections and the level of detail (cars, environments etc,) are quite stunning. The vegetation density and the draw distance impress mightily. All in all, the game looks very realistic.

Forza Horizon 5 creates a very dense atmosphere. The game intro impressed us in particular with its cleverly designed video sequences. The vehicle handling is very good as well.

Even though Horizon 5 is more stable and better optimised than Forza Horizon 4, we still ran into some bugs (we installed the Steam version because of our prior bad experiences with the Microsoft Store). On many of our test systems, the settings menu failed to open properly. Pressing Alt and Enter at the same time or restarting the game seemed to fix the issue.

The graphics menu, which consists of two submenus, leaves nothing to be desired. The Display tab contains the settings for resolution, scaling, refresh rate (including an optional FPS cap), V-Sync and display mode. The Graphics tab contains around 20 settings which have a direct impact on the visuals. For those who do not want to do any tinkering with the visual settings, there are 6 presets. Unfortunately, graphics changes require a restart to take effect once the game world is loaded in (the loading times are quite long). Microsoft’s racing game supports ray tracing.