Forza Horizon 3 marks the series’ PC debut as part of the Xbox Play Anywhere program. I’ve been playing the PC version since yesterday, and so far nothing horrible has happened. In fact, almost everything is fine.
It’s sad that a PC port of a game that’s traditionally been a console exclusive had me primed for disaster, but that’s just the way things are these days (thanks Obatman). I loaded up Forza Horizon 3 on my gaming system (Intel Core i7 6700, Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition and 32GB RAM) prepared for the worst. Instead, I got a very playable version of the game I’ve enjoyed quite a bit on my Xbox One.
The game loaded a bit faster than on console, dropping me into the action exactly where I left off. It detected my hardware, set me up on ultra everything and then set me free to roam the roads of Australia.
It isn’t perfect. Maintaining 60 frames per second with all of the bells and whistles enabled is tough even at 1920 x 1080. The massive open-world areas can bring even a robust PC to its knees from time to time. To help smooth out potential frame drops, the developers have included a Dynamic Optimization option, which tweaks settings on-the-fly based on what sort of environment you’re driving in.
There are a lot of options to tweak to help strike a balance between look and feel.
These are the settings used in the video above.
While normally I prefer 60 frames per second, here I’m a bit more forgiving of the game dipping under. The Xbox One version runs 30 frames per second, and I like that just fine. On PC I didn’t even notice it wasn’t running at a steady 60 until I turned on my capture software and saw the numbers. Plus, I can get a steady 30 frames per second at 4K resolution, which is quite lovely.
Looking through the user reviews in the Windows 10 store, I’m seeing plenty of folks overjoyed at the PC performance, and several complaining about the occasional frame rate dips, requesting further optimisation options in settings. That’s fair.
What I am not seeing is a massive wall of people complaining the game does not work, or constantly crashes, or kills their house pets. That’s not to say there haven’t been complaints. On the official Forza forums, many users have been dealing with an issue with the game crashing before starting. Several solutions have been submitted, including uninstalling Avast antivirus, reinstalling video card drivers and unplugging unnecessary peripherals. For a list of other known PC issues, check out this forum post.
However, it hasn’t been a the fiasco people may have expected. Mind you that only purchasers of the premium package are playing right now — the core game releases on Tuesday — but it’s looking like Playground Games and Microsoft pulled this off with only a few hitches.
Comments
23 responses to “Forza Horizon 3 Runs Fine On PC”
Not sure which option I should go for on the Windows Store. The exxy editions available are hard to differentiate.
What’s a good site showing a comprehensive list of cars and options available? I never bothered with the previous Horizons.
Plus a lot of the bonus content you get seem to be xbox only, I’m seriously confused on what version to buy.
You get a different pre order bonus depending if you buy from Xbox or Windows store too. Pretty much if you think you’ll play heaps and want constant bonus cars gifted to you, buy a higher edition. If you think you’ll just play a little, just get the standard edition.
@king_rocket (and leigh) this:
http://forums.forzamotorsport.net/turn10_postst64402_Forza-Horizon-3—DLC-and-Editions-List.aspx
has everything listed (I think), it’s a bit of a mess to read through though…
Shit like this makes me not want to buy games that I actually want to buy.
$120 when the last version was free?
im interested but not that interested….
How are you this clueless? If you actually read up anywhere with a simple Google Search you would know Forza 6: Apex is a on-track Racing game that was Forza 6 but Free on PC since it had almost been out for a year and they felt PC gamers were missing out.
Whereas the Forza Horizon series is an open world game made for fun with cars that has been released on both PC and XB1 at the same time, hence the full price, both series have always been payed games, and you don’t need to pay $120, you can pay $100 (which although is expensive as shit, it’s Microsoft and it’s their platform, what can we do) and if you really hate Microsoft just get it off G2A in a couple of weeks for like $70-$80.
so people downvote me because I dont have a spare 100 bucks at the moment?
yeah… those people are twats
thanks for explaining it akitsukuni … I dont have time to read everything
if its open world like the crew and TDU2 then im going to have a look at a few streams…
still 100 is like 4 weeks of food for me :/
Forza Horizon 3. Forza horizon, an Xbox 360 game was games with gold. 2 was not free. Or do you mean that pissy tech demo forza 6 apex?
Not sure if I just can’t drive in Forza, but sometimes I can’t get decent traction on any surface, so far playing the demo and the buggy seems to be the worst.
Preloaded the day before you could play it and updated my nvidia drivers that night. Next morning it wouldn’t progress past the playground splash screen. Checked and there was a new nvidia driver which after reboot fixed it. No issues since.
The only issue I’m having is that I play elite controller with shifter and clutch on the Xbox, and wired 360 controller on PC. The game syncs my difficulty settings, including gear and shifter setup, no way I can manage that on the 360 controller. I wish I could switch my elite between devices seamlessly.
How are you enjoying the game itself?
I’m stilll a little on the fence with this one, love the track Forza games but was never a fan of the Horizon ones. This one being in Australia has sucked me in a bit though – that and it looks way better than I remember Horizon 2 being
I haven’t had enough time to play as much as I’d like, still don’t quite understand how the whole building your own festival works, not sure how that’ll go, but loving driving. Also the demo seems a little more arcade than the full game. Driving the exact same way in the final game had me spinning out vs easily drifting everything in the demo, which is good.
I don’t feel it should be a challenge for a game to maintain 60fps at 1080p on a GTX 1080.
We’ve now moved into a world where a PC game that works makes news …
Does anyone know if pc players can get a copy for a reasonable price? It seems like pc players can only buy through the windows online store? Is there a boxed copy? Xbox one you can get a copy for $79 (jb hifi). It does not seem fair that pc players would have to pay $100. If microsoft want to promote this play anywhere thing, fixing that would be a start. Its a great idea but only if pc players are treated equally.
Check the Whirlpool forums for a guide on buying Xbox games from a different region. Got the PC/Digital version for close to $69 AUD through the Singapore Microsoft store.
Cheers. I already got impatient and bought it. Good advice for next time though! Still, it annoys me that we would need to do it that way.
Surprised the censorship board didnt have anything to say about the tobacco advertising to minors, since its even illegal to advertise to adults.
Where and how is the advertising.
It isn’t blanket Banned, there are many exemptions.
Scroll up until you see marlboro.
Thats custom art that someone has painted on their car. Its hardly the same thing as Tobacco advertising.
“What I am not seeing is a massive wall of people complaining the game does not work, or constantly crashes, or kills their house pets.”
Guessing you didn’t go on the forums or the Microsoft Store on release day. The Microsoft Store had a rating of 2.5/5 with many giving it one star due to not being able to download it (Updating Windows fixed this for most but not all), and the forums were flooded with people who couldn’t load the game.
I couldn’t load the game myself and it took a combination of fixes to get it working (disabled every microphone input, updated graphics drivers, started the game, switched to windowed mode and 1080p, load game, change to 1440p fullscreen, restart)
Even after I got it working it constantly crashed on PC and if you browsed the forums you saw many with the same issues. And the graphics were messed up. Put everything on ultra and it looked like VGA graphics.
Xbox One also had issues. There were certain races that would crash when finishing them.
Credit to Microsoft though. They saw so many complaints and released a bunch of fixes and now it runs perfectly on PC. Well there’s still an occasional crash but they’re rare. Up until yesterday the Xbox version would still crash during certain things (mainly buying cars) and when it crashed you would need to force power down the Xbone then unplug it for a few seconds or you wouldn’t do anything.
All that said, brilliant game. Well worth the price especially now that everything seems to have been fixed up. One thing to keep in mind is that the servers will probably get hammered and it’ll struggle for the first few days of official release.
No Demo No Buy. im sorry, i dont want to waste my money on something that doesnt work