HiGame

If you’re a diehard PC gamer, you probably don’t have much of a history with the Forza franchise. This traditionally console-based series dipped its toe into the PC market with the free-to-play release of Forza Motorsport 6: Apex earlier this year, but Forza Horizon 3 marks the first simultaneous release on console and PC. And now that it’s been in the wild for a few days, we’re starting to see exactly how far Playground Games and Microsoft can push this engine on high-end PC hardware.

Even though Horizon 3 runs relatively smoothly at 30Hz on the Xbox One, the recommended specs for the Windows 10 version of the game are surprisingly high. The developers think you should be running at least a Core i7-3820 CPU, a GTX 970/R9 290X graphics card, 4GB of VRAM, and 12GB of RAM for a 1080p experience. Want to run the game at 2160p? Well, the “ideal specs” are listed as a Core i7-6700 CPU, a GTX 980Ti/R9 Fury X graphics card, 6GB of VRAM, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD.

After fighting with the Windows Store for a few days, the Digital Foundry team has finally given the game a once-over on a top-tier setup. With a Core i7-6700K and a Titan X Pascal, 2160p at a solid 60 frames per second was achievable as long as the anti-aliasing was configured to use FXAA instead of 4x MSAA.

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