Forza Horizon 5 Enabling Raytracing in Races, Free-Roam
With the next big content update, Forza Horizon 5 will finally include playable raytracing during normal gameplay. Even though raytracing has been a part of the game from launch, it has only been accessible in limited circumstances like the Photo Mode displays.
Forza Horizon 5 Enabling Raytracing in Races, Free-Roam
Although Forza Horizon 5’s visuals are impressive, fans have long hoped that developer Playground Games will explore raytracing in more depth. After it was announced that the next Forza Motorsport will have full raytracing support at launch, it felt like the open-world Horizon would only have a restricted version of the capability.
However, after the completion of Forza Horizon 5’s 10-year anniversary season on November 8, 2022, this will no longer be the case. In particular, developer Playground Games has now revealed that Forza Horizon 5 will get a substantial raytracing upgrade that will enable players to turn on and off the visual option whenever they choose, both during race events and open-world exploring. Support for modern upscaling techniques, such as DLSS 2.4 and FSR 2.2, has been included to this version, enabling players to recoup some of the performance they’ll lose while rendering the game with raytracing turned on.
Changing the relevant option to “Ultra” or “Extreme” for PC in one of the finest open-world racing games of all time enables raytracing at the gameplay level, with the claimed optimal hardware requirement being either Nvidia’s RTX 3080 or the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. During both timed races and free-roam periods, only the player’s car will get high-resolution reflections, while all other vehicles will be rendered in the standard rasterized fashion, as explained in Playground Games’ helpful raytracing feature chart.
This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, especially as FH5 still looks beautiful while employing rasterization, and restricting full raytracing to only the player car is likely the required tradeoff between visual quality and speed. In contrast to Forza Horizon 5’s open-world Mexico, the next-generation Forza Motorsport game just needs to display a few dozen automobiles racing on a closed-down racing circuit.
While the most recent body kit update for Forza Horizon 5 didn’t include many new customization possibilities, the next Donut Media season, which kicks off on November 8, could fix this. In addition to raytracing in-game, gamers can look forward to a large selection of new vehicles and 21 retro Rocket Bunny wide-body kits.
For the more latest news on Games, keep on following us here on GamerCottage
