Forza Horizon 6’s Ray Tracing: Is This Visual Upgrade a Pit Stop or a Pothole?

Alright gearheads and graphical gurus, buckle up! We’ve been putting Forza Horizon 6 through its paces at The Nerd Bureau, pushing pixels and pedals across a myriad of gaming rigs. The verdict? FH6 is generally a stunner, running smooth as silk even on older hardware, no need for aggressive upscaling tricks. This open-world racing adventure truly shines.

But here’s where the rubber meets the road, and sometimes, it skids. There’s one setting, a perennial favorite of ours in PC gaming, that left us scratching our heads: ray tracing. Yes, the ultimate visual flex, usually a game-changer for graphical fidelity, feels more like a speed bump in FH6.

The game offers two flavors: ray-traced reflections and global illumination. Technically, they both do their job, rendering pixel-perfect light and glimmer on shiny surfaces. We’ve seen the comparisons, and on paper, the ray-traced version looks superior in our tests.

Especially ray-traced reflections, which undeniably beat screen-space alternatives that can pop in awkwardly. However, when you’re tearing through a landscape at 200 MPH, those subtle visual improvements vanish faster than a pit stop. Your brain barely registers the difference in this fast-paced racing game.

Then there’s ray-traced global illumination (RTGI). This should elevate the entire world, right? In Forza Horizon 6, it feels… underwhelming. We suspect the sprawling, dynamic open-world nature dilutes its impact, but it also strangely scrubs out surface details in some areas. That’s a graphical downgrade we can’t ignore.

Now, about performance. With a beast like the RTX 5090 running at 4K with DLSS Quality, enabling ray tracing costs roughly a 36% frame rate hit. While not trivial, it’s manageable and could be recouped with more upscaling or frame generation for optimal gaming performance.

But here’s the kicker: for us, it’s not about the performance impact of these graphics settings. It’s about the perceived value. The minimal visual uplift, coupled with the odd detail loss from RTGI, simply doesn’t justify enabling it for the best gaming experience.

We’re the type to crank every graphic setting to eleven, then fine-tune performance. Yet, even with all the horsepower, our post-testing drives in FH6 have been blissfully ray tracing-free. It’s a rare moment when cutting-edge tech doesn’t earn its spot in a game review.

Of course, your mileage may vary! If you find the ray tracing delightful, you’ll be pleased that at lower settings and resolutions, these options are quite accessible. Enjoy those shiny cars and pristine reflections in your racing gameplay.

Amplo Insights: Forza Horizon 6 delivers an incredible open-world racing experience with robust visuals and performance. While ray tracing is present, its implementation provides such a minor, often imperceptible, visual boost—and sometimes even a detriment—that the performance cost, however small, simply isn’t worth it for most players. Drive on, but maybe leave the RT in the garage and focus on raw speed and framerate.