Forza Horizon 5 PC System Requirements Announced; Ray-tracing Hardware 'Ideal'

The Forza Horizon series has long been an excuse for car enthusiasts to drool over virtual vehicles, so it’s not a surprise that the upcoming instalment has some challenging recommendations.

The Forza Horizon series has long been an excuse for car enthusiasts to drool over virtual vehicles, so it’s not a surprise that the upcoming instalment has some challenging recommendations.

Forza Horizon 5 looks set to show off some of the highest fidelity visuals on the new generation of consoles when it debuts this November, but we should remember that the driving sim is also due on PC next month. In anticipation of its release the developers have discussed some of the features we can expect to see when it arrives on the platform, and outlined the hardware recommendations including minimums and a high-performance ‘ideal’ specification.

Playground Games state that Forza Horizon 5 on PC has been built from the ground-up to ‘deliver the open road in extraordinary detail at limitless speeds’ on the PC, and in service to that they unlock 4K ultrawide and monitor resolutions, unlocked frame rates, and enabled HDR lighting. More importantly though, the team are planning to expose the whole gamut of image quality and performance settings to the user rather than rely on a series of pre-baked configurations, helping the enthusiast tinker their way to the perfect set-up for them.

Support for a wide selection of peripheral hardware is also planned, including the following:

– Logitech: Driving Force, G25, G27, G29, G920, G923PS, G923XB, Momo
– Thrustmaster: Ferrari 458, T150 RS, T300 RS, T500 RS, TMX, T-GT, TS-XW, TX, TS-PC
– Fanatec: V1, V2, V2.5, CSL, CSL DD, DD1, DD2, Universal HUB device

while haptic feedback for the XBOX Wireless Controller should be available for both Windows Store and Steam versions of the game.

That being said, hardware requirements might be the most important aspect of this info. dump.

Broadly speaking, the minimums are designed to be as low an entry-point as possible for the game. AMD’s Radeon RX 470 is the lowest performing GPU sold in the mainstream that will have driver support due to the sunsetting of the 300-series earlier this year, while the NVIDIA GTX 970 is a workhorse that’s still widely used despite its age (now over seven years). CPU minimums are similarly low with just a modest quad-core chip being necessary, and if your system isn’t equipped with at least 8GB of RAM then you probably won’t expect to run Forza on it anyway.

The recommended specification also isn’t quite as worrying as some might have expected. We’re not quite at the RX570/GTX 1060 levels of a couple of years ago, but the RX 590 and GTX 1070 isn’t too bad all things considered. The VRAM of the card might be as big an impediment as the raw performance as 8GB is stipulated for both AMD and NVIDIA, potentially indicating that the 3/6GB GTX 1060’s and 4GB RX 580’s will struggle.

The Forzavista mode lets you get up close and personal with the curves of your favourite motor.

Playground Games have added a third category however: ‘Ideal’. It’s likely that this is the expected hardware configuration for a good experience at 4K resolutions, and both AMD and NVIDIA GPU requirements aren’t messing around. The RX 6800XT and RTX 3080 are both $1000+ cards today, representing a major drain on a system configuration budget, plus the high performance 8-core CPUs aren’t exactly affordable either.

It’s notable that both Ideal GPUs also support hardware accelerated ray tracing in addition to their high performance credentials. The game itself will not feature the technology in competition modes at launch but will support it in the ‘Forzavista’ car exploration mode; it will be a disappointment for some, but not necessarily a surprise given that ray tracing won’t be available on current gen console at all.

Forza Horizon 5 is scheduled for release on November 5th, and is available to pre-order from the Microsoft Windows Store and Steam today.