A Next-Gen Visual Showcase with RTGI and Full-Scene Reflections
Forza Horizon 6 is designed as a showcase for modern graphics hardware, pushing the upgraded ForzaTech engine harder than ever. On PC, the game introduces a complete ray-traced pipeline for both global illumination (RTGI) and reflections, dramatically changing how light behaves across cars and environments. RTGI augments traditional rasterized lighting with more realistic indirect illumination and ambient occlusion, grounding objects with convincing shadowing and light bounce even at racing speeds. Car paint, road surfaces, and environmental details all react more naturally to shifting light conditions. Ray-traced reflections go beyond simple cube maps, enabling self-reflections, car-on-car highlights, and highly detailed urban reflections that make city streets feel alive. Combined with advanced refraction shaders that simulate rainbow-like behavior in plastics and polycarbonate elements such as headlights and taillights, Forza Horizon 6 sets a demanding baseline for any gaming GPU comparison targeting maximum visual fidelity.
Test Setup and Presets: How the 47-GPU Benchmark Was Run
The Forza Horizon 6 GPU benchmark in focus uses a Ryzen 7 9800X3D system with fast DDR5 memory and Resizable BAR enabled, ensuring the graphics card is the primary performance limiter. Testing covers 47 GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel across native 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions. Four key presets are examined: Extreme+RT and High+RT for full ray tracing, plus Extreme and High without ray tracing but with other settings pushed. The built-in benchmark is used because it closely mirrors real gameplay, giving a realistic picture of frame rates and 1% lows. Preset scaling reveals unusual behaviour between architectures, particularly when comparing Radeon RX 9070 XT and GeForce RTX 5070 Ti across quality levels. These shifts, especially at lower presets, highlight how driver optimizations, ray tracing performance, and CPU utilization can all influence a comprehensive graphics card performance test in this title.
Ray Tracing Performance: Which GPUs Survive Extreme+RT at 1080p?
With the Extreme+RT preset at 1080p, Forza Horizon 6 becomes a brutal stress test for ray tracing performance. Nvidia’s RTX 5090 leads comfortably, averaging 157 fps and outpacing the RTX 4090 by 38% and the RTX 5080 by 45%. The RTX 5080 reaches 108 fps, around 9% ahead of the RTX 5070 Ti, which itself slightly edges out the RTX 4080 series. AMD’s RX 9070 XT averages 91 fps and trails the RTX 4080 while remaining a strong performer at this setting. The standard RX 9070 overtakes the RTX 5070 by 9% and is 16% faster than the RX 7900 XTX, showing major gains over last generation in this game. Midrange cards like the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB average 63 fps—about 40% faster than its 8GB variant—landing alongside the RTX 4070, RTX 3090, and RX 7900 GRE and underlining how VRAM capacity and architecture both matter at max settings.
VRAM, Upscaling, and the Nvidia vs AMD Divide
VRAM usage in Forza Horizon 6 is aggressive enough that earlier testing suggests you need at least 12GB of video memory to extract the best performance at high settings, especially with ray tracing enabled. The Extreme+RT preset illustrates this: the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB significantly outperforms its 8GB counterpart, achieving 40% higher frame rates and aligning with higher-tier GPUs. Upscaling further widens the gap between architectures. At native 1440p Extreme+RT, the RTX 5070 Ti is only 4% faster than the RX 9070 XT, but once DLSS is enabled for Nvidia and FSR for AMD, the Nvidia lead expands to 8–14%. This suggests that while AMD hardware can compete at native resolutions, DLSS currently offers a more effective uplift in this title. Combined with some inconsistent preset scaling on Radeon cards, it points to room for additional driver and upscaler tuning on the AMD side.
Frame Generation Limitations and Practical GPU Recommendations
Despite broad support for DLSS, FSR, and XeSS upscaling, Forza Horizon 6 currently restricts frame generation to Nvidia’s RTX 40 and RTX 50 series via DLSS. The game ships without FSR Frame Generation or XeSS frame interpolation, leaving AMD and most Intel users unable to leverage extra AI-generated frames. This omission is particularly limiting for AMD’s latest GPUs, which could otherwise use FSR’s hardware-agnostic frame generation to close the gap at extreme ray tracing settings. For players targeting maximum settings with ray tracing, high-end RTX 50- and 40-series cards deliver the smoothest experience, especially when DLSS and frame generation are enabled. Strong upper-midrange options with at least 12GB of VRAM remain viable at 1080p and 1440p, but older and 8GB-limited GPUs will need reduced presets or disabled ray tracing. Until FSR Frame Generation arrives, GPU selection heavily favors Nvidia for those chasing both visual fidelity and very high frame rates.
