Forza Horizon 6 PC Performance Review

Forza Horizon 6 is the sixth entry in Playground Games' beloved open-world racing series, and it arrives on PC and Xbox Series X/S on May 19, with a later release date for the PlayStation 5. The setting this time is Japan, and it's immediately clear why the developers held off until now. This is the franchise's largest and most densely released map to date, and it shows in every corner you take.

The Japan of Forza Horizon 6 is beautiful, chaotic in the best possible way, and layered with things to find across its 10 distinct regions. Tokyo City alone is five times the size of Forza Horizon 5's Guanajuato, trading Mexico's sunbaked sprawl for neon-lit boulevards, elevated expressways, and winding industrial docklands, which brings the city to life and makes it endlessly explorable.

For this review, we're focusing specifically on PC performance — how well Forza Horizon 6 runs, how it scales across hardware, and whether all that visual ambition holds up in practice. On that front, Playground Games has come well-prepared. The PC version ships with the full suite of modern rendering technology like NVIDIA DLSS, multi-frame generation, and more. AMD FSR is also on board for non-NVIDIA hardware.

Photo Credit: Xbox Game Studios/Playground Games

Forza Horizon 6 System Requirements

Forza Horizon 6 scales across a wide range of PC hardware, with four official presets covering everything from budget builds to enthusiast rigs. At the minimum end, you're looking at an Intel Core i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 5600, a GTX 1650, and 16GB of RAM — enough to target 1080p at 60fps on Low settings, though don't expect a particularly comfortable experience at those settings.

Preset - Low	Minimum at 1080p
CPU	Intel i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600
GPU	AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 or Intel Arc A380
RAM	16GB
Software	Windows 10 64-bit 22H2 or later
Storage	160GB+ SSD

The recommended tier steps things up to an RX 6700 XT and an i5-12400F, aiming for 1440p at High. Beyond that, the Extreme and Extreme RT presets push into genuinely demanding territory, with 24GB of RAM at Extreme and 32GB for ray tracing at 4K — the latter paired with an NVMe SSD, which the game strongly recommends regardless of your preset.

Preset - Extreme RT	Extreme RT at 4K 60fps
CPU	Intel i7-12700K or AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
GPU	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
RAM	32GB
Software	Windows 10 64-bit 22H2 or later
Storage	160GB+ SSD

The install itself sits at around 155GB, and the game continuously streams and decompresses world assets as you drive, meaning a slow drive will show itself in stutters almost immediately.

Testing Rig

For testing, I paired the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which sits on the MSI Z890 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi motherboard, and 48GB of Kingston Fury Renegade non-binary DDR5 RAM clocked at 6000MT/s (using XMP Profile 3). Storage was handled by a WD Black SN850X (2TB).

Forza Horizon 6 was tested on an MSI G274F monitor with a 180Hz refresh rate. The GPU driver version used was 596.49, which was rolled out on May 12.

CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070
GPU Driver Version	Version 596.49
Motherboard	MSI Z890 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi
RAM	48GB DDR5 (6000MT/s) Kingston Fury Renegade
Storage	WD Black SN850X (2TB)
PSU	MSI MAG A1000GL
Monitor	MSI G274F 180Hz Gaming Monitor

Forza Horizon 6 Graphics Settings and Features

Forza Horizon 6 comes with the expected range of graphics presets — Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Extreme and mirrors the top three presets with ray-tracing variants: High RT, Ultra RT, and Extreme RT. That gives you a meaningful spread of options that scales from older budget cards all the way up to flagship GPUs.

Beyond the presets, the game opens up a granular settings menu where you can individually adjust car level of detail, environment texture quality, car reflection quality, raytraced reflection quality, shadow quality, shader quality, and quite a bit more. On the upscaling side, NVIDIA users get DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution with Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance modes, Multi Frame Generation for significant frame rate boosts, DLAA for those who prefer native resolution with better anti-aliasing, and NVIDIA Reflex. AMD and other users are covered through FSR. One thing worth flagging: switching between graphics presets requires no restart, which makes experimenting with different configurations far less tedious than it tends to be in most PC games. I tested Forza Horizon 6 using the built-in benchmark tool across multiple presets to see how the game scales.

Forza Horizon 6 Performance and FPS Data

At 1080p on the Extreme preset without any upscaling tricks in play, the RTX 5070 delivered 131fps natively. High preset pushed that to 164 fps, and even with ray tracing enabled at the High+RT tier, the card held a very respectable 137 fps. Step up to Ultra+RT natively, and you're still at 104 fps, which is a genuinely impressive result. The only place native performance starts to show strain is Extreme+RT, where the benchmark returned 79 fps with the GPU running at 99.3%. It’s still playable, but clearly at the limit of what the RTX 5070 can do without assistance.

That's where DLSS and the rest of the AI trickeries earns its place. Switching to DLSS Balanced on the Extreme preset pushed the average from 131 to 135 fps, which is a negligible gain, but the real muscle comes from Multi Frame Generation. With 2x frame generation, Extreme+RT climbed from 79 fps to 143 fps. Enabling 4x MFG took that all the way to 258 fps, with latency at a manageable 29.7ms.

And Extreme+RT at those framerates is worth every bit of the setup. Ray-traced global illumination and reflections change the character of Horizon in Japan in ways that are immediately and viscerally noticeable. Cherry blossoms casting soft, diffused light across mountain roads, neon signs bleeding colour onto wet Tokyo asphalt, car bodies reflecting the city around them with an accuracy that screenshotters are going to have a field day with. It's the kind of visual quality that makes the game feel less like a racing game and more like a window into somewhere real.

Photo Credit: Xbox Game Studios/Playground Games

Should You Buy Forza Horizon 6?

Forza Horizon 6 is the rare sequel that earns the number in its title. Playground Games hasn't just moved the festival to a new location — they've used Japan as a reason to raise every bar, and the results are immediately felt. The environment is the most visually convincing the series has ever produced, with a level of detail in the world itself that speaks to how seriously the team took the setting. The cars look exceptional, there's a staggering roster available from day one, and the audio design is some of the best work in the genre — the way engines sound against different surfaces, in tunnels, on open mountain roads, is the kind of thing you notice without realising you're noticing it.

Photo Credit: Xbox Game Studios/Playground Games

On PC, the game is well-optimised for what it's asking of your hardware. Ray tracing adds genuine depth to the visuals. Tokyo at night with RT enabled is a different experience from Tokyo without it, and the difference is immediately visible in how light interacts with bodywork and wet road surfaces. The RTX 5070 handled the workload cleanly across my entire test session. There were occasional micro-stutters, but they were fleeting — milliseconds at most — and never disruptive enough to pull you out of the experience. If you've played previous Forza Horizon titles, this is not a game you skip. Playground Games has a serious winner on their hands.

Forza Horizon 6 starts at Rs 5,499 and goes all the way up to Rs 9,699 for the Premium Edition on Steam. The latter gives you early access all with all the other niceties.