Forza Motorsport With Ray Tracing Mods Looks Great, but Crashes and Bugs Ensue

What's up, doc?

Digital Foundry's tech wiz, Alex Battaglia, noticed improved detail, draw distances, and object density. The grass and overall vegetation from the maps, such as trees and bushes, don't look as flat, are denser, and can be seen further away in the distance when using the mods, enriching the landscape.

In some cases, there are even more people in the bleachers, animations and all. The mods also heavily affect building facades and interiors. If before, almost every outside angle of a building wore the same greyish tone and improperly lit intensity, the mod correctly lights everything, adding shadows where they needed to be from the beginning.

The press releases featured RTGI affecting structures but didn't make the cut. It's too bad you'll pass them at 150 mph, so you wouldn't normally notice the ray-traced buildings, but sometimes, simply knowing the changes are there is enough.

The tracks, however, experience a more visually impactful effect. For example, the shadows on the side walls are not only correctly cast but also properly colored. Light bounces off the surroundings, shading everything with the appropriate color. Natural shading means a better visual experience, at least during the day. Even track screens now emit light from their source, illuminating the environment.

More importantly, the interior of the cars never got proper illumination. Now, with the ray-traced enhancements, even light from the sky correctly bounces off the steering wheel and other parts of the cockpit's geometry and materials. Not only that, but you can see the ceiling and other details for the first time, having been pitch black before.

Even the color from the car's hood reflects off the interior side pillars. Sure, some graphical artifacts sparkle inside the cabin, like Rolls-Royce's celestial starlight roof due to bugs, but as mentioned, this is more of a "what would have been" type of mod. Now for the bad news. If it rains, especially at night, the mod somehow forgets to display the shadows and lighting on the roads, and basically stops working correctly.

The Performance Cost

So, how much will these mods impact your PC? The DF team used a 3080 to display the game at 1440p at Ultra Settings using DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing). Alex noticed a 27% performance tradeoff. The frame rate went down from 64 to 47 frames per second.

Using the exterior or 3rd person viewpoint, he recommends the closest camera to the car to minimize the impact. However, your PC will take a 40% critical hit for the interior POV. The frames dropped from 63 without the mod to 37 fps with everything turned on.

Just like in Bloodborne's 30-official vs. 60-modded fps case, Turn 10 still hasn't launched a proper graphical improvement update or patch. People in the video's comments are still yearning for such a download to come from official sources, although for now, it looks like nothing is on the horizon from the developers.

Why doesn't the OG game look much better than Gran Turismo 7?

The last time the tech wizards from Digital Foundry analyzed footage from Forza Motorsport was when they compared the graphics to Gran Turismo 7. The verdict was pretty much a tie, with both games having positives and negatives in various visual departments.

Suffice it to say that, for a true next-gen game, when it launched back in October 2023, it didn't visually impress a lot of people. In many instances, it had the same level of quality as Gran Turismo 7, but in theory, FM should have won the graphical trophy.

GT7 launched in March 2022 on PS5 and PS4, which meant it took a visual hit because the graphics had to cater to two different PlayStation console generations. For example, PlayStation 4 only had 1.84 TFLOPs, while PS5 can develop just slightly above 10 teraflops.

For those unfamiliar with TFLOPs and other such nerdy terms, a teraflop is like an engine's horsepower, but for gaming hardware. GPU potential is usually roughly measured this way, but when referring to consoles, it's the simplest way to evaluate their power.

The more teraflops a console has, the better it can run games at higher framerates and resolutions. So, with the PS5 being 5.4 times more powerful than the PS4, developer Polyphony Digital had to find a graphical middle ground, especially because it was meant to hit 60 fps on the weaker console.

As for Forza Motorsport, it didn't come out on Xbox One, only on the current Xbox generation, so visually, it should have blasted GT 7 out of the water, right? Well, this is where the problem most likely lies. While Series X is even more powerful than the PS5, proudly boasting 12 teraflops, developer Turn 10 Studios had to compromise for a weaker console, the Xbox Series S, with only 4 TFLOPs.

To go even further down the geeky rabbit hole, Series S is still 2.17 times more powerful than the PS4, so why doesn't Forza Motorsport look twice as good as Gran Turismo 7? Well, this is where many "ifs and buts" would come into place, so let's just leave it at a "creative decision" level and be done with it.

However, according to industry nerds, the upcoming and yet-unannounced PS5 Pro has slightly over 36 TFLOPs. So, while GT 7 doesn't have ray tracing during actual gameplay, the new Sony console might very well come out blasting with first-party graphical upgrades, including their flagship racing game. At the end of the day, they do need to market the PlayStation 5 Pro somehow, so why not just add ray tracing to every game they produced and come out with a bang?

On Life Support

We don't know the numbers from the Xbox ecosystem, but we do know that Forza Motorsport isn't doing all that well on the old PC, at least not on Steam. It currently sits with a "Mixed" review score of 41% from barely over 7,000 players, meaning it didn't sell millions upon millions of copies.

On the other hand, Forza Horizon 5 is living the good life with an 88% "Very Positive" score awarded by 171,633 people. The math indicates there's little chance the latest entry will ever be as successful as Horizon.

In the past 24 hours (at the time of writing), the game only saw a maximum of 832 players. Its 4,703 all-time peak from 9 months ago also hasn't changed. In comparison, its older sibling, Forza Horizon 5, which has been on the market since November 2021, continues to see an astounding increase in player count, crossing the 40 million user  threshold, which is spectacular.

Granted, this doesn't mean all those people are currently playing it, not by a long shot. However, it does mean that during its lifetime, Xbox managed to get its flagship arcade-style racer into the hands of 40 million players through Game Pass and various discounts—a figure Forza Motorsport doesn't even dare to dream of.

As a quick comparison, on Steam, Horizon 5 peaked with 19,865 people in the past 24 hours while maintaining its 3-year-old 81,096 peak. With those numbers in mind, it begs the question: Why did Xbox shift Horizon's developers, Playground Games, to make Fable and not Forza Horizon 6? It could be that the team is large enough to co-develop FH 6 and Fable, but only time and industry leaks will tell.

Currently, the Forza Motorsport standard version is 60 bucks, but if you want to try it out for cheap, there's always the monthly $20 Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, the $12 PC Game Pass, or the $10 Xbox Game Pass Core subscription services.