In a Steam announcement, Playground Games recently revealed the PC system requirements for Forza Horizon 6. The eagerly awaited title finally takes players to the various environments of Japan, a highly requested setting ever since the first Horizon installment back in 2012.
Emphasis was placed on making the game playable for a wide variety of system specs, from tiny-but-mighty portable gaming machines like the Steam Deck, all the way up to six-figure custom racing sims. Check out the table the developers shared below and see where your system lands:
It’s worth noting the different graphics presets, resolutions, and framerate targets in each performance spec tier.
The ‘Minimum’ requirements running low settings for a 1080p/60fps target is no surprise—the spec provided is more or less at the level of a handheld gaming console. Playing games on a Steam Deck or ROG Ally often necessitate cutting back visual fidelity for performance, usually at less than full resolution. If the developers accurately assessed the minimum spec, then Horizon 6 should be a treat for gamers on the go.
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On the other end of the performance stack, the ‘Extreme RT’ tier...is actually not that demanding? Don’t get me wrong, it’s still specced out with higher-end parts, just not the absolute highest end that triple-A titles usually demand for maximum eye candy. I believe the caveat here is that it’s stating 60+fps with ray tracing (a more accurate but demanding lighting system) at an upscaled resolution of 4K.
Upscaling, for those out of the loop, makes the game run at a lower resolution in the backend and uses advanced algorithms to render it for you at a higher resolution. In a perfect world, you could be playing at a higher framerate offered by 1080p while experiencing the visual fidelity of 4K. But upscaling is an imperfect process. The main drawback is that it can introduce visual imperfections into the scene. It’s a tradeoff that comes down to the gamer to decide if it’s worth running.
So, true 4K with all the graphical bells and whistles like ray tracing and global illumination turned on might be reserved for flagship PCs after all. Still, my takeaway from the recommended spec chart is that Playground Games hasn’t slacked off on optimizing Forza Horizon 6’s PC release.
I’ve played previous Horizon titles on humble hardware in the past. Even with settings turned down to extract a bit more frames, they still had that photorealistic sheen rarely found elsewhere. I’m hoping that the same can be said for the Horizon 6—it’s the game that everyone’s been waiting for, after all.
Forza Horizon 6 launches on PC and Xbox on May 19 and is available on pre-order on digital storefronts now.
