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Forza Horizon 4 isn’t just one of the best Xbox exclusives, it’s also one of the best racing games ever made. A couple of years ago, we raved about the excellent Xbox One, One X, and PC versions, and we loved the way Microsoft’s upgraded console offered the 1080p60 racing option, a first for the series. With the advent of Xbox Series X and Junior S, 60 fps is now the standard. The advantages of the new version are evident across the board, but surprisingly, and disappointingly, there are some visual cutbacks as well.
With this new patch, Forza Horizon no longer has multiple performance modes to choose from. In theory, you shouldn’t need them anymore. Xbox Series X has twice the GPU power of Xbox One X, so it stands to reason that the One X’s 4K30 quality mode should move to 4K60 on the new X. Meanwhile, Series S offers feature parity and runs at 1080p. Put them side by side, and the quadruple of resolution is obvious and helps greatly with the presentation of the game. Forza Horizon 4 is primarily set outdoors with lots of distant details, foliage, and thinner geometric elements, so this increased resolution means much higher fidelity at a distance and less flickering and aliasing throughout the image. Looking closely at the textures, Xbox Series X offers improved texture quality compared to its S Series counterpart. In part, this is due to the resolution, but the quality of the ambient texture is also improved.
Another update that comes with the generational change stems from faster CPU and storage, resulting in a large reduction in interface lag. There are also very significant improvements to loading time: loading from the menu to the open world takes 61 seconds on Xbox One X, and drops to just 18.5 seconds on Series X. Loading a user-created racing event on Xbox One X takes 25.5 seconds, down to just 11.5 on the X Series. This reduction in downtime is great and overall makes the open world and event-based nature of the game much more enjoyable. Since both consoles in the series have similar architectures, they also have similar load times. I tried the main menu to open the world load on both machines and saw almost identical results.
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Forza Horizon 4 Series X / Series S update video review.
Performance also looks impressive on both machines. I’ve played a number of user-created racing events and spent a lot of time driving the game in various weather conditions and it’s hard to fault the delivery of any of the new machines in the series. The open world works flawlessly (unless a curious stutter in Series XI cannot be played) and there is only a minimal slowdown in events, usually before the race begins, which is essentially unnoticeable as there is no control. user.
Again, the performance between the two machines appears to be essentially similar, but a few more discarded frames showed up on the S-Series. It’s almost irrelevant to the gaming experience, but the fact that they’re there is puzzling – Xbox Series S is designed to run native 4K content at 1440p. Here, 33 percent of the rendering power is implemented to deliver just 25 percent of the pixels; There should be overhead here, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with actual in-game performance.
Of course, there is more to a game than resolution and frame rate – pixel quality is of the utmost importance. In 2018, I discovered that the two Xbox One X graphics modes were running on different settings for various aspects of the game. To achieve 1080p60, Playground reduced motion blur, reflection quality and details of the world car, and disabled night shadows cast by its headlights. The reflections from the car in 60fps mode were a mix of ultra and high for their resolution and the number of objects drawn, but they worked at 30fps like the PC’s low setting. So for Xbox Series X, I was hoping all these compromises would go away; I walked in expecting the One X’s 4K30 quality mode to run at 60fps, but that’s not the case unfortunately.
Gets some updates: Car model quality has improved, while real-time sonar reflections applied to vehicles now also work at 60fps, unlike on Xbox One X. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been improved much further with compared to 1080p60 mode on Xbox One X, so by extension we are missing features found in One X quality mode. For series consoles, that means headlight shadows at night are missing. present in races, only in the open world; they are present in both in 4K30 on One X. Most confusing of all is the total absence of ambient occlusion of the screen space. (SSAO): While shaded areas on Xbox Series X can be high resolution, they lack credible shading and look very plain. Although not that important, motion blur is still using the similar lower sample count found in Xbox One X 1080p60 mode and is also using the short shutter speed option found on PC, so it is almost invisible in most scenes. My biggest issue here is that in general the images just don’t look as good as 4K30 quality mode on Xbox One X.
There are other issues as well, like the fact that third-person controller models update their animations to 30fps on series consoles, while everything else runs at 60fps. This is not a problem with the original Playground code, as the PC version runs these animations at the correct frame rate. It’s also worth noting that all of these issues are present on both Xbox Series X and Series S; they are effectively the same game, simply operating with different resolution goals. Focusing specifically on the X Series though, given the GPU and CPU differential here from generation to generation, I wonder why there are tradeoffs to visual quality – look at the myriad of improvements found in Gears 5 on the X Series. Not to mention the resolution differential between the X and S consoles and it’s clear that Forza Horizon 4 doesn’t offer the same kind of improvement.
In general, my reaction to the Forza Horizon 4 update for the series consoles is mixed. This is still one of the best driving games ever made, it still looks magnificent and the improvements in quality of life delivered by the faster CPU and storage are highly appreciated, while the advantages of 60 frames per second in this genre. they cannot be underestimated. However, it can’t be right for a next-gen upgrade to compromise visual features when we know the hardware is capable of more. We shared our findings with Microsoft as soon as we saw something was wrong, and they told us that SSAO could be back in the first title update. With a studio as talented as Panic Button in development, I am hopeful that the X and S Series will deliver the ultimate Forza Horizon 4 console experience in the fullness of time, with no compromises.
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