Forza Horizon 4 on PC is one patch away from perfection
Playground Games is back with a new Forza Horizon, complete with a creditable PC port just a patch or two away from being something truly special. While the series has deep roots on Xbox consoles, Forza as a franchise is still fairly new to PC and it's had some definite growing pains. Forza Horizon 3, in particular, initially launched with some CPU-related issues, but the good news is that this area is much improvedthis time around. In fact, the overall improvement in this area is so dramatic, I have to wonder if the introduction of the Xbox One X 60fps performance mode may be partially responsible.
As things stand, the PC game takes everything that makes the console versions so good and allows users with suitably powerful rigs to play with fewer compromises. So yes, if you want the X's 60fps mode with full 4K resolution and improved quality settings, that's no problem at all. It's all there for you - if you have the hardware capable of making it happen. However, as we shall discover, despite the arrival of a new 'extreme' quality preset, Xbox One X owners get a robust presentation that delivers almost all of PC's visual feature set. It's mostly in ultra territory, with the next-level extreme only providing diminishing returns in terms of visual upgrades.
Starting at the beginning, Horizon 4's option menu deserves kudos. Users have in-depth control over 20 different performance and visual options. There's full support for 21:9 ultrawide screens (though some cutscenes do clip to 16:9) and if you don't have such a display, field of view can be adjusted for many of the game's camera views. Each graphical preset boasts between three to six different settings, and this time around Playground has also included a frankly brilliant benchmarking tool, reminiscent of the excellent Gears of War 4, and great for balancing settings against hardware. Let's just say that without it, this article would have been a lot more difficult to put together.
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