Forza Horizon 6 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5%

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Texture Quality at Ultra.

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

Typical impact 8-25% · 12% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (12% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Forza Horizon 6: ForzaTech's shadow system costs roughly 15% FPS at Ultra. Medium is the best quality-to-performance ratio — higher settings offer diminishing returns on fast-moving road surfaces.

Typical impact 3-20%

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Reflection Quality at Ultra.

Controls the method and fidelity of surface reflections. Low settings use pre-baked cubemap probes — a single texture lookup per pixel. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) that ray-march through the depth buffer to find reflected geometry. High uses higher-resolution SSR with more march steps. Ultra may enable planar reflections (re-rendering the scene from a mirrored viewpoint) or RT reflections (hardware-accelerated rays). The cost escalation from cubemaps to SSR to RT is dramatic — cubemaps are nearly free, SSR costs 3-8%, and RT reflections cost 15-25%.

In Forza Horizon 6: Ray-traced reflections are the second most expensive setting. Car paint and wet road surfaces benefit most. High is VRAM-hungry at 4K; Medium provides nearly identical results.

Typical impact 20-50%

In Forza Horizon 6, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In Forza Horizon 6: FH6's RT Global Illumination is the single most expensive setting. Enabling High RT roughly halves framerate — DLSS Quality + RT Medium is the best quality-per-frame trade-off.

Typical impact 5-18% · 7% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Volumetric Fog at High (7% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Forza Horizon 6: ForzaTech's volumetric fog adds atmospheric depth to Japan's mountain passes, coastal roads, and urban canyons. Off removes all volumetric haze, which looks flat in dawn/dusk lighting scenarios. Low and Medium provide convincing fog with a moderate ray-march sample count. Extreme uses the full sample density and integration depth — the visual difference vs. Ultra is marginal in motion at racing speed, and the additional cost (roughly 4% GPU frame time) is rarely worth it. High is the recommended balance point.

Typical impact 5-20% · 8% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend View Distance at High (8% fps cost).

Sets the maximum distance at which world geometry, props, and objects are rendered. The engine performs frustum culling and occlusion culling on all objects — increasing view distance dramatically increases the number of objects passing visibility tests, leading to more draw calls submitted to the GPU command processor. In UE5 titles, this also affects Nanite virtual geometry streaming range. The CPU cost of scene traversal and draw call submission often bottlenecks before the GPU at extreme view distances.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the draw distance for world geometry LODs — how far out the game maintains high-detail terrain, props, and foliage. In ForzaTech's large Japan open world, higher view distances increase CPU draw-call submission overhead as well as GPU vertex cost. Note: this setting was not explicitly confirmed during live verification — it may appear under a different label or be subsumed by Environment Geometry Quality. If present in-game, Extreme adds roughly 10–16% GPU/CPU overhead in open areas versus Low.

Typical impact 3-12%

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at Ultra.

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

Typical impact 0-1% · 1% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Anisotropic Filtering at 16x (1% fps cost).

A dedicated anisotropic texture filtering control that adjusts the maximum number of additional texture samples taken per pixel for surfaces at steep viewing angles. At 16x, up to 16 taps are taken along the anisotropy axis in the texture unit hardware. This computation is overlapped with ALU work in the shader pipeline, so even maximum settings cost virtually nothing on modern architectures. The visual payoff is significant — eliminates blurriness on ground planes and distant walls.

In Forza Horizon 6: ForzaTech's road surfaces and tarmac texture atlases are viewed at extreme oblique angles during normal driving — precisely the scenario where anisotropic filtering pays off visually. Off produces noticeable blurring on road markings and kerb textures beyond 20 m. The hardware texture units on any DirectX 12 GPU handle 16x anisotropic filtering with near-zero cost since the additional taps are overlapped with shader ALU work. There is no reason to run below 16x in ForzaTech — the visual improvement on road surfaces is large and the frame-time cost is unmeasurable.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Forza Horizon 6, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Forza Horizon 6: DLSS is likely present for NVIDIA GPU users but was not confirmed during live verification (user is on AMD RX 9070 XT). If present, DLSS 4.x runs transformer-model super resolution on RTX Tensor Cores with Quality/Balanced/Performance/Ultra Performance modes. No 'Ultra Quality' tier exists in DLSS 4.x. DLSS Quality at 1440p renders at ~960p and should provide the sharpest upscaled image of any available option on NVIDIA hardware, given ForzaTech's clean motion vectors. Verify availability in-game on your GPU.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Forza Horizon 6, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Forza Horizon 6: FSR 4.1 is AMD's latest spatial upscaler, available as a full resolution-scaling mode (distinct from the FSR AA mode in the Anti-Aliasing menu which runs at native resolution). Quality mode renders at 67% of native linear resolution; at 1440p that is approximately 960p. ForzaTech is one of the better-optimized hosts for FSR — clean motion vectors from the racing camera produce stable temporal results, and the image quality at Quality mode is close to native. Ultra Performance (33% resolution) is viable in Forza's clean-geometry environments where upscaling artefacts are less exposed than in complex foliage-heavy scenes.

Typical impact -25-65% · no measurable cost

In Forza Horizon 6, the recommended preset leaves Intel XeSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Intel Xe Super Sampling — a temporal upscaling technology that uses machine learning inference to reconstruct high-resolution frames from lower-resolution input. On Intel Arc GPUs, XeSS runs on dedicated XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) AI accelerator hardware. On non-Intel GPUs, XeSS falls back to a DP4a (dot product of 4 8-bit integers) shader implementation that runs on standard compute units. The neural network takes the current low-resolution color buffer, motion vectors, depth, and responsive masks as input. Quality mode renders at ~77% of native, Performance at ~50%.

In Forza Horizon 6: Intel XeSS 2.0 is available as a full upscaling mode alongside FSR. On Intel Arc GPUs it uses dedicated XMX hardware for the ML reconstruction pass; on other hardware it runs in a generic mode. Quality through Ultra Performance follow the same resolution ladder as FSR. Level names are standard XeSS 2.0 — confirm in-game if naming differs. On Arc hardware, XeSS quality typically matches or slightly exceeds FSR 4.1 at equivalent modes.

Typical impact -30-80%

In Forza Horizon 6, the recommended preset leaves Frame Generation off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Synthesizes entirely new intermediate frames between real rendered frames using optical flow analysis. DLSS Frame Generation (NVIDIA Ada+) uses the Optical Flow Accelerator hardware to compute per-pixel motion between consecutive frames, then a neural network generates a synthetic frame by warping and blending the two surrounding real frames. AMD FSR Frame Generation uses a software-based optical flow compute shader implementation. The generated frame is inserted between real frames, effectively doubling perceived framerate. The trade-off is approximately 1 frame of additional display latency and potential artifacts on fast-moving objects where optical flow estimation fails.