Forza Horizon 6 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 1-6% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Feature Car LOD at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the level-of-detail quality for the player's own vehicle (the feature car). Higher settings maintain the highest-polygon mesh at greater distances and disable LOD transitions entirely for the player car — ensuring maximum detail in replays and exterior views. The feature car receives dedicated rendering resources including higher-resolution shadow maps and additional material passes. The cost is paid even during racing since the vehicle is always visible in bumper or roof cameras.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the polygon count and LOD transition distances for hero vehicles — your car and the cars immediately around you in races. At Extreme, the full-detail car model (often 500k+ polygons with individual weld seam geometry) is maintained at all camera distances including wide-angle race starts. Low uses aggressively simplified LODs visible on close inspection in Forzavista garage mode. High is sufficient for racing; Extreme is most noticeable in photomode and close follow-camera replay shots. The performance cost is modest — roughly 2–3% GPU frame time between Low and Extreme.

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Environment Texture Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Controls texture resolution for environment surfaces — roads, buildings, vegetation, terrain, and props. Higher settings load larger mip levels (2K/4K) into VRAM for world geometry. Unlike character textures, environment textures cover vast screen-space areas, so high-resolution environment textures provide noticeable sharpness gains at medium view distances. The VRAM footprint is the primary constraint — a large open world at Ultra can exhaust 8GB of VRAM with environment textures alone.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the resolution and mip-chain detail of ForzaTech's world surface textures — road tarmac, building facades, vegetation, and terrain splat maps across Japan's open world. Texture streaming is well-implemented in ForzaTech; Extreme loads the full 4K+ asset tier but requires significant VRAM headroom (expect 10+ GB at 4K Extreme). Ultra is the practical ceiling for 8–10 GB cards at 1440p. The visual delta between Ultra and Extreme is most visible standing still in Horizon Festival hub areas; at racing speed it becomes nearly indistinguishable.

Typical impact 2-8% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Environment Geometry Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Sets the polygon budget for environmental geometry including buildings, roads, terrain, and world props. Higher settings use denser meshes with finer geometric detail on large-scale structures. In open worlds, this primarily affects the rate of LOD transitions — how quickly distant low-poly meshes switch to full-resolution models as the player approaches. Higher geometry quality keeps high-resolution meshes visible from further away, increasing vertex shader and rasterizer load.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls LOD thresholds and draw distances for environmental geometry: buildings, roadside barriers, trees, rock formations, and world props across the Japan map. At Extreme, high-polygon props are maintained at long view distances with minimal LOD pop-in. At Low, aggressive LOD bias causes visible building simplification even at moderate distances during open-road driving. High provides a good balance — pop-in is limited to the far background and GPU draw-call overhead is roughly halved compared to Extreme in dense urban sections of the map.

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 3-15% · 10% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Reflections at High (10% fps cost).

Master reflections quality control that governs the fidelity of surface reflections across the scene. Low uses cheap pre-baked cubemap probes. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) tracing through the depth buffer. High increases SSR resolution and step count. Ultra may enable ray-traced reflections using hardware RT cores. Each tier increases GPU compute cost significantly as the reflection technique changes from lookups to ray marching to hardware rays.

In Forza Horizon 6: The top-level reflections quality setting controls the fidelity of ForzaTech's screen-space reflection pipeline. Car bodywork, wet tarmac, and glass surfaces rely heavily on SSR in Forza's racing perspective. Very Low is the floor (no Off option here) — reflections are present but extremely low resolution, appearing blurry and unstable on moving surfaces. High provides solid SSR quality appropriate for most racing conditions. Extreme adds higher sample density and a wider reflection cone but at notable cost in wet-weather sequences where the entire road surface reflects the environment.

Typical impact 5-15% · 12% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Screen Space Reflections at High (12% fps cost).

Computes reflections by ray-marching through the depth buffer in screen space. For each reflective pixel, a reflection ray is traced using hierarchical Z-buffer tracing (Hi-Z) — stepping through mip levels of the depth buffer to quickly find intersections. Higher settings increase the maximum ray march steps (16 to 128), enable multi-bounce SSR (tracing a second reflection from the hit point), and use higher-resolution tracing. The fundamental limitation is that SSR can only reflect what is visible on screen — off-screen geometry produces fallback cubemap reflections.

In Forza Horizon 6: A secondary SSR quality control that works alongside the main Reflections setting. Off disables SSR entirely, falling back to static reflection captures — significantly flat on car hoods and puddle surfaces. At Extreme, SSR uses full-resolution buffers with maximal step counts, producing accurate reflections to screen boundaries. The cost scales significantly: Off → Extreme can represent 12–18% GPU frame time difference in reflection-heavy sequences like wet Kyoto city stages. High is recommended unless you're enabling Ray Trace Reflections, in which case Low SSR is sufficient as RT fills in the accurate reflection layer.

Typical impact 10-30% · 22% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Ray-Traced Reflections at Medium (22% fps cost).

Enables hardware-accelerated ray-traced reflections using DXR/Vulkan RT. For each reflective pixel, one or more reflection rays are dispatched into the BVH acceleration structure, returning accurate reflections of geometry not visible on screen — something SSR cannot do. Each ray traverses the BVH tree of scene triangles, testing intersections before shading the hit point. Higher quality tiers increase rays-per-pixel, sample radius, and denoiser quality. Costs 15-30% FPS on complex scenes.

In Forza Horizon 6: Ray-traced reflections are the showcase RT feature in Forza — car bodies reflecting accurate environment geometry including other vehicles, trackside objects, and the skybox, without SSR's off-screen limitations. At Low, RT reflections apply to car bodywork only; at High, full-scene RT reflections are enabled. This is one of the most GPU-demanding settings in the game: High RT reflections add roughly 30–36% GPU frame time versus Off. On mid-range hardware, keep this Off and rely on High SSR instead. On RTX 3080 and above, Low RT reflections provide a meaningful visual upgrade at manageable cost.

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 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Night Shadows at Ultra (4% fps cost).

Controls shadow quality specifically under artificial lighting at night — streetlights, headlights, building lights. These are point or spot light shadows, which require rendering a shadow cube map (6 faces) or shadow map per light source. Higher settings increase the shadow map resolution and the number of lights permitted to cast dynamic shadows simultaneously. Night scenes with many street lights are the most expensive scenario since each light adds shadow rendering overhead.

In Forza Horizon 6: Specifically controls shadow casters and shadow map resolution during nighttime driving sequences. Only three tiers exist: Off (no night shadows — cars and environment cast no shadows under artificial lighting), Ultra, and Extreme. The absence of a Low/Medium tier reflects ForzaTech's all-or-nothing approach to night shadow cascades. Off is strikingly flat on night races through Tokyo and mountain tunnel sequences. Ultra provides full shadow casting at reasonable cost; Extreme adds higher-resolution shadow maps for crisp headlight beam shadows on barriers and tyre walls. Cost difference between Ultra and Extreme is roughly 4% GPU frame time during night racing.

Typical impact 5-15% · 12% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Screen-Space Global Illumination at High (12% fps cost).

Approximates indirect diffuse lighting using geometry visible in the current frame. Short rays are traced through the depth buffer from each surface point to gather radiance from nearby geometry, simulating one bounce of indirect light. Unlike ray-traced GI, SSGI is limited to on-screen geometry — occluded surfaces or those behind the camera produce fallback lighting. The technique integrates with temporal accumulation (TAA/DLSS) for noise reduction.

In Forza Horizon 6: Screen-space global illumination provides indirect light fill in enclosed spaces — garages, tunnels, underpasses, and the shadowed undersides of bridges across Japan's mountain routes. There is no Low tier: the scale jumps from Off to Medium. Off removes all SSGI, leaving these spaces lit only by ambient light probes which can look flat in the game's moody dawn/dusk lighting. Medium provides meaningful indirect fill; Ultra runs a higher-quality GI integration pass. Cost ranges from 6% (Medium) to 18% (Ultra) GPU frame time in GI-active enclosed scenes.

Typical impact 15-40% · 22% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Ray-Traced Global Illumination at Medium (22% fps cost).

Implements multi-bounce global illumination using hardware ray tracing. Secondary rays are dispatched from primary surface hit points to gather indirect lighting from surrounding geometry, simulating light that bounces through the scene. Unlike SSGI which is limited to screen-space geometry, RTGI sees geometry behind the camera and in unlit areas. Each bounce multiplies the ray budget. A temporal denoiser accumulates samples across frames to reduce noise. This is the most expensive GI technique.

In Forza Horizon 6: RT global illumination traces indirect light bounces from the sky, sun, and artificial light sources into the scene — producing accurate colour bleeding from red barriers onto white car bonnets, or warm sunset fill bouncing through mountain forest passes. At High, RT GI runs a full multi-bounce path at high sample count: this is among the most expensive single settings in the game, adding roughly 30–32% GPU frame time over Off. Low RT GI provides single-bounce indirect lighting at lower sample count — a good compromise that captures the key artistic benefit at roughly 12% GPU overhead. Disable entirely on mid-range hardware and use Screen Space GI at Ultra instead.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Shader Quality at High (5% fps cost).

Controls the fidelity of material shaders used for surface rendering. Lower quality uses simplified BRDF approximations with fewer shader instructions per pixel — often removing subsurface scattering, multi-layer materials, and per-pixel detail computations. Higher quality enables physically-based material evaluation with full PBR specular models, fabric simulation (anisotropic specular), and more accurate Fresnel responses. In games with heavy shader permutation counts, higher settings increase GPU occupancy requirements.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the number of material shader permutations compiled and the precision of material evaluation across ForzaTech's extensive car and environment material library. At Low, material variation is simplified — paint metallic flake, clearcoat depth, and brake disc heat glow use cheaper approximations. At Extreme, the full material permutation set is active, which increases GPU state-change overhead in scenes with many unique material types. The cost of Extreme vs. Ultra is roughly 4–6% GPU frame time in environments with high material variety. The visual impact of Extreme is most noticeable in photomode close-ups of paint and fabric surfaces.

Typical impact 2-15% · no measurable cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at XeSS AA (no measurable cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Forza Horizon 6: The Anti-Aliasing dropdown selects your AA method when running at native resolution — separate from the Resolution Scaling menu which enables actual upscaling. TAA is ForzaTech's native temporal AA: good stability, slight ghosting on fast-moving tyre smoke and debris. FSR AA applies AMD's FSR spatial reconstruction pass at native resolution for a slightly sharper result than TAA at near-zero extra cost. XeSS AA applies Intel's temporal reconstruction at native resolution. If you enable FSR or XeSS upscaling in the Resolution Scaling menu, that setting overrides the AA dropdown — the upscaler provides its own AA.

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% · 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 0-1% · no measurable cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend FidelityFX CAS (Sharpening) at On (no measurable cost).

AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) applies a sharpening pass to the final frame using a compute shader. CAS detects local contrast to apply spatially-varying sharpening — strong sharpening where the image is soft (low contrast edges), gentle sharpening or none where it is already sharp. Unlike naive unsharp mask sharpening, CAS avoids halos around high-contrast edges. A strength slider controls the maximum sharpening amount. Cost is essentially zero — the compute shader runs in roughly the time of a single texture pass.

In Forza Horizon 6: AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening applies a spatially-aware sharpening pass as a final post-process step. GPU cost is negligible. Most useful when using FSR or XeSS upscaling at Balanced or Performance modes, where the upscaling process introduces some softness — CAS recovers edge clarity without introducing haloing artefacts. At native resolution with TAA, CAS can counter TAA's inherent softness. Disable if you prefer a softer, more cinematic look or if you are using DLSS (which has its own sharpening built in).

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 0-1% · no measurable cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Audio Quality at Ultra (no measurable cost).

Controls audio sample rate, mixing complexity, and spatial audio fidelity. Higher settings enable higher sample rates, more simultaneous audio voices, more reverb convolution channels, and more precise 3D audio spatialisation via HRTF. Modern audio middleware (Wwise, FMOD) runs primarily on a dedicated CPU core, so audio quality has minimal impact on GPU performance but may cause CPU-bound frame time spikes in scenes with many concurrent audio sources.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls audio sample rate, reverb quality, and convolution buffer size — a CPU/audio processing cost, not a GPU cost. GPU frame time impact is zero. On integrated audio (Realtek etc.), Very Low may relieve audio thread CPU pressure that otherwise introduces frame pacing hitches in CPU-bound scenarios. For dedicated audio hardware, Ultra is recommended for the richest engine sound reproduction — ForzaTech's car audio is a highlight.

Typical impact 8-20% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Crowd Density at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the maximum number of NPC entities spawned in populated areas. Each NPC requires CPU-side AI evaluation (navigation mesh queries, behavior tree ticks, perception checks), skeletal animation blending (bone matrix computation), collision detection, and GPU-side skeletal mesh rendering with skinning transforms. The primary bottleneck is CPU-side — animation blending and AI ticking for 100+ simultaneous NPCs can saturate multiple CPU cores.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the number of pedestrians, roadside spectators, and ambient crowd characters in the Japan festival world. Higher settings populate the environment more densely, adding life and atmosphere to festival zones and city streets. CPU-sensitive in crowded areas; has a modest impact on frame times.

Typical impact 1-5% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Deformable Terrain at High (4% fps cost).

Enables or sets the quality of real-time terrain deformation — tyre tracks, skid marks, dirt displacement, and surface deformation from vehicle or physics impact. The deformation is typically stored in a deformation texture that is composited onto the terrain shader each frame. Higher quality increases the deformation texture resolution, the persistence of deformation marks (how long tracks remain), and the number of active deformation zones tracked simultaneously. The GPU cost is primarily from the deformation texture writes and heightmap sampling.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls whether dirt, grass, and gravel deform under tyre contact — the ruts and spray patterns that build up during off-road racing on Japan's rally stages. Off disables deformation entirely: terrain surfaces are static, which looks noticeably wrong on dirt stages. Note: there is no Low tier — the scale jumps from Off to Medium. Medium enables basic deformation geometry; Extreme maximises deformation mesh resolution and the particle systems that accompany it. Cost is primarily GPU compute for physics deformation: Off → Extreme is roughly 5–8% GPU frame time on dirt-heavy stages, negligible on tarmac circuits.

Typical impact 2-8% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Particle Effects at Medium (4% fps cost).

Controls the emission rate, lifetime, and rendering quality of particle systems. Particle effects include smoke, sparks, debris, water spray, and dust clouds. Higher settings increase the maximum particle count, enable per-particle lighting (each particle evaluates the lighting model rather than using a baked ambient colour), and use higher-resolution textures per sprite. GPU particles (simulated in compute shaders) have largely eliminated the CPU bottleneck, so the cost is now primarily GPU fill rate from many semi-transparent sprites overlapping on screen.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the count and simulation quality of ForzaTech's particle systems: tyre smoke, exhaust, dust clouds on dirt, rain splash, sparks from barrier contact, and Horizon Festival fireworks. Very Low significantly reduces emitter counts and simulation fidelity — tyre smoke is notably sparse and lacks the volumetric depth of higher settings. High provides full visual quality at roughly 7% GPU frame time overhead. Ultra pushes emitter counts further with minimal perceptible benefit during racing; most relevant in Festival and convoy sequences with many simultaneous effects.

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 0-3% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Lens Quality at Ultra (4% fps cost).

Controls fidelity of camera lens simulation effects — lens flare, anamorphic streaks, and optical bokeh. Lens flare is computed by tracing ghost reflections through a virtual lens model, placing reflection sprites along the axis from bright sources through screen centre. Anamorphic streaks apply a horizontal-only convolution of bright pixels. Higher quality increases the number of ghost reflections, streak sample count, and bokeh simulation fidelity. Effects are added in a post-process pass after tone mapping.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the quality of camera lens effects: lens flares from the sun and oncoming headlights, bokeh depth-of-field in replay and photomode, and bloom bloom around light sources. Off disables lens effects entirely — a clean, flat image without chromatic halos. Ultra enables full multi-element flare simulation and high-resolution bokeh. GPU cost is low (roughly 2–4% frame time) since these are post-process passes. Useful to leave at High or Ultra since the visual contribution is high relative to cost, but Off is valuable for competitive players who want zero visual noise.

Typical impact 1-5% · 4% fps cost

In Forza Horizon 6, we recommend Motion Blur at Ultra (4% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Forza Horizon 6: Controls the quality of per-object and camera motion blur applied during high-speed driving. Off removes all blur — maximum perceived sharpness and best input responsiveness for competitive play. Low applies minimal blur at extremes of camera speed only. Ultra applies full-sample velocity blur that produces a cinematic feel in replays and at extreme speeds. GPU cost is roughly 2–4% frame time at Ultra. Competitive players should use Off or Low; casual and replay-focused players will appreciate High or Ultra.