Forza Horizon 6 PC: Our Optimised Settings for Mainstream, Mid-Range and High-End Systems

Forza Horizon 6 on PC offers a significantly more user-friendly tuning experience than its predecessor, with a revamped menu that allows major adjustments without requiring a full game reboot. The inclusion of a live preview system, complete with real-time CPU, GPU, and VRAM monitoring, makes it much easier to see the immediate impact of individual settings. However, there are still a fairly overwhelming number of tweakables here, so we've rounded up the most critical settings to change to give you a head start.

In a shift towards modern standards, the game has entirely removed older anti-aliasing methods like MSAA and FXAA. Instead, the focus is squarely on temporal techniques, including TAA, FSR 3.1, XeSS, and DLAA. For performance, upscaling technologies from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are fully supported alongside frame generation. While dynamic resolution scaling remains absent, the built-in benchmark continues to provide a reliable high-stress test for assessing how these modern techniques interact with your hardware.

Texture quality is one of the most critical settings for managing both visual fidelity and memory overhead. The extreme preset is exceptionally sharp but can consume upwards of 13GB of VRAM, making it the sole reserve of top-tier cards. For those with 12GB GPUs, ultra is the more sensible recommendation, as it looks nearly identical while freeing up over a gigabyte of memory. Users on 8GB cards should stick to high, which offers a significant 2GB VRAM saving compared to extreme while still maintaining a respectable level of detail.

Ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) is perhaps the most transformative visual feature, adding physically accurate bounce lighting and superior scene coherence. However, it is also the most expensive setting in the game. At its high setting, RTGI can drop performance by nearly 50 percent compared to standard screen space global illumination (SSGI). For a manageable but still impressive high-end experience, RTGI medium is the preferred compromise, while mainstream players should stick to SSGI high to maintain smooth frame rates.

Environmental geometry and car level of detail settings follow a pattern of diminishing returns. Dropping car LOD from extreme to ultra results in no noticeable visual change, while high only offers a tiny performance gain at the cost of visible geometry reduction. Similarly, environmental geometry is best kept at ultra for a healthy balance of foliage and grass density. While moving to high provides a roughly 10 percent performance boost by cutting back on distant detail, settings lower than this offer very little extra benefit for the visual trade-off.

The game's reflection system is a highlight, featuring stable dynamic cube maps for vehicle bodywork and mirrors. While the high setting for car reflections is the clear recommendation due to bugged or placeholder behaviour at extreme, the more intensive screen space reflections (SSR) and ray-traced options require careful consideration. SSR high provides an excellent balance for mainstream builds, whereas high-end users can opt for SSR extreme or the significantly more demanding RT reflections, the latter of which adds roughly 1.5GB to VRAM usage.

Shadow settings are surprisingly lightweight given their visual impact. The extreme preset for standard shadows provides the cleanest presentation without the aliasing found on lower rungs, and since the performance cost is negligible, there is little reason to turn it down. Night shadows, however, are a different story, with extreme carrying a much heavier cost. For those needing more headroom, ultra night shadows restore the essential dynamic headlight effects while offering a five to six percent performance saving over the top preset.

*Ultra is recommended for 12GB GPUs, while extreme is best reserved for GPUs with more than 12GB of VRAM
**Extreme SSR remains a great non-RT alternative, while high RT reflections is preferable for GPUs with sufficient performance and VRAM headroom.

Further fine-tuning can be found in shader and volumetric fog qualities. Extreme shaders are ideal for high-end builds to maintain depth through parallax occlusion mapping, but high is a perfect mainstream compromise. Volumetric fog is remarkably efficient, with high, ultra and extreme performing almost identically. Given that turning it off entirely only yields a three percent gain at a massive cost to atmosphere, keeping this on high is the best strategy for almost any configuration.

When these optimised settings are applied, the performance gains are transformative. On a mainstream system, our mainstream optimised settings can offer a 57 percent performance increase over the game's default extreme settings on a Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3070 test system at 1440p DLSS Balanced, moving from 58fps to 91fps. Adding on RTGI medium and low RT reflections, our optimised settings deliver a 69fps experience - much more comfortable than the 35fps experience on the Extreme + RT preset.

Even on high-end hardware, these tweaks ensure more efficient scaling for high-refresh-rate displays. We move from 99fps on a Ryzen 9950X3D and RTX 5090 system at 4K DLSS Quality to 116fps using our high-end optimised settings, without noticeable visual sacrifices. Moving to DLSS Performance better takes advantage of high-refresh rate displays, at 131fps, with frame-gen potentially moving visual fluidity still higher if you prefer.

All told, Forza Horizon 6 is one of the most technically polished racing games on PC, with a highly scalable experience that runs well on a wide variety of hardware, from power-sipping handhelds to desktop behemoths. Settings behaviour is well-tuned, visual cutbacks are sensible, and many traditionally expensive rendering features remain surprisingly lightweight. Even 8GB GPUs can work well with tuning, which is no small feat. Well done, Playground Games.