Last night I accidently fired up my copy of Forza Horizon 3 on my Windows 10 PC. Hey, It’s right next to my other favorite games, it was a mistake – especially at 12AM. Once the game started up I was informed that the game had an update waiting for me and the game then closed so that the update could be applied. At first, I thought it might have been the Blizzard Mountain update but that isn’t due until December, so I was a bit confused. In total the update was about 350-360MB and once it was completed I fired up the game again.
It would seem that the update was yet another PC optimization update and one that wasn’t announced. I wasn’t able to find anything about it on Forza Motorsports Twitter feed or the website. So the million dollar question is “Did the performance improve”? The big issue with the PC version of Forza Horizon 3 is that seems that everyone’s experience with the PC performance has been mixed. One person says that they never experience issues while another person says that the game runs terrible. I just happen to fall into this position as my first experience with the game was positive, until the first patch where my performance tanked.
With the new update, I’m happy to report that I did see better framerates using ultra settings with dynamic optimization disabled and at several resolutions – 3440 x 1440, 2560 x 1440 and 1920 x 1080. At all three resolutions, I was able to hit between 50-60fps, though it was still wasn’t consistent. I still did encounter some stutter from time to time, but not as badly as before. Testing consisted of driving around Surfer’s Paradise, as well as some open road racing sessions. The results are easily higher than before the patch was released. It’s worth mentioning that I did update to the latest Nvidia drivers for my card as well and yes I know Nvidia has been under fire as of late. Their graphic card drivers have been hit/miss for the past few months. For those looking my PC specs, I was running this on my main rig with an Intel i7-5820k, GTX 1080 and 16GB DDR4. I didn’t get a chance to try it on a lower spec PC just yet but I will update my findings, later on, today.
It’s nice to see that Turn 10 and Playground Games haven’t given up on the PC version and continues to pump out these updates. Especially since FH3 is easily on of the better racing titles on the platform currently available. Hopefully, later we’ll get an official announcement regarding the update and patch notes.
