Best Forza Horizon 5 settings for PC and Steam Deck

More popular than ever, the Forza Horizon series is a more casual approach to what is typically a simulation-style racing franchise. Finding the best Forza Horizon 5 settings is crucial to hitting a buttery smooth frame rate, but also still having Mexico and your collection of cars look absolutely stunning.

Be sure to check out the Forza Horizon 5 system requirements before you dive into the game, as while they're not overly demanding, it's best to take care of any upgrades you might need before playing. It's also worth checking out our guide to the best gaming monitor, as you'll want to experience Forza Horizon 5 in all its glory, and a basic 1080p, 60Hz display won't quite do it justice.

• Anisotropic filtering: High
• Shadow quality: Ultra
• Night shadows: Off
• Motion blur quality: High
• Environment texture quality: Ultra
• Environment geometry quality: Ultra
• MSAA: x4
• FXAA: Off
• SSAO quality: Ultra
• Reflection quality: High
• World car level of detail: Ultra
• Deformable terrain quality: Ultra
• SSR quality: High
• Lens effects: High
• Shader quality: High
• Particle effects: Ultra
• Ray tracing: Optional

Our recommended settings were determined through a combination of real-world tests and the game's built-in benchmark. Thankfully, Forza is a shockingly well-optimized game that not only caters to the average gaming PC but has plenty to offer those with one of the best graphics card picks from our buying guide, as well as anyone with an aging, less-powerful gaming rig. Here's our breakdown of the performance impact of individual settings, in order from biggest to smallest:

Shadow quality affects the resolution and rate at which shadows update, and can be the most taxing graphics setting in Forza Horizon 5. The Extreme preset in combination with the High shader quality setting and night shadows offers fantastic visuals, but tanks performance by a whopping 30%. Thankfully, moving down to Ultra costs just 7%, but we'd recommend keeping the shader quality at High, meaning this level of shadow fidelity costs 15% in total. Night shadows are a nice extra, but given their 4% cost and the fact you'll only benefit from them during night-time sequences, they're an easy omission to recommend if you're struggling to maintain consistent levels of performance. Your only other options here are the Low setting, which has a 1% performance impact in comparison to the Very Low preset with the low shader quality, but we'd recommend pursuing other avenues to boost your frame rate.

Reflection quality controls the quality of reflections in car bodies/mirrors, which you'll naturally be seeing a lot of in your shiny new sports cars. This setting may be bugged, as we found that neither its performance cost nor fidelity didn't increased past the High setting. Your mileage may vary, and this might be resolved by a future patch, but for now, we recommend the High setting with its 13% frame rate footprint. Medium will net you a 4% performance gain compared to High, but given how prevalent these reflections are, we'd think twice before turning this setting down.

As we mentioned earlier in this settings guide, the game turns off SSAO if you opt for the High preset. We think this is a smart decision by Playground Games, as the extra depth offered to the game by turning up SSAO quality can get lost in the fast motion of Forza Horizon 5's racing. It comes at a sizeable 16% performance cost as well, requiring the shader quality setting to be set to High. This is the first setting we'd recommend you omit if your gaming PC isn't hitting target frame rates.

MSAA (multi-sample anti-aliasing) helps get rid of those pesky jagged edges that can cause shimmering, which we find particularly distracting during gameplay. There are four levels to choose from, including off, but we recommend 4X. It'll hit your frame rate by about 10%, but you can turn it down to 2X to mitigate your losses to just 5%. 8X is overkill in our opinion, costing a massive 20%, but it's also worth bearing in mind that this setting has a minor increase to VRAM usage from 0.06GB-0.5GB. FXAA is also available as an anti-aliasing setting, but it's frankly not worth using when MSAA 2X is available.

As you might expect, the world car level of detail affects the fidelity of Drivatars you encounter in the open world and AI race opponents. This setting can have up to a 10% performance cost and also affects VRAM usage by about 0.2GB when moving upwards from Low. Like the reflection quality setting mentioned earlier, we didn't notice any difference in visuals or frame rate between this setting's Ultra or Extreme level. As such, we recommend Ultra for now, but Extreme is worth considering. Moving down to Medium offers a 6% performance improvement compared to High, while Low reduces VRAM usage and improves your frame rate by 7%.

Particle effects quality controls the visual splendour of volumetric effects like smoke from wheel spins and various other particle effects throughout the game, such as those present in its sandstorms. Your choices here are basically either Medium or Extreme, as we don't recommend anyone use the Very Low settings, and the Low/High modes offer extremely little in the way of performance gains. We recommend most people opt for the Extreme setting, with an 8% performance cost, but Medium provides a decent 4% improvement by comparison and doesn't look much worse.

In lieu of ray-traced reflections, which we'll touch on more when we get to the full-fat ray-tracing setting, Forza Horizon 5 uses SSR quality (screen space reflections) to handle its reflections in bodies of water. This is particularly noticeable when driving on rain-soaked streets, but given how the majority of your driving will be in decidedly sunny weather, this is another setting worth eyeing up for a chop. If you opt for the High setting, you'll trade 5% of your frames per second, while Medium and Low offer a measly 1-2% increase. If you're lucky enough to have one of the best graphics cards available, throw the Extreme setting on and watch your frame rate tank by 18%.

Moving on to motion blur quality, this cost us 7% of our frame rate in our testing, regardless of which setting we chose. This will largely depend on your personal preference when it comes to this particular setting, whether to have it on or off. Personally, we think Forza Horizon 5's implementation of motion blur enhances the feeling of speed and weight in its cars and would recommend it be kept on, but this is an easy win if you're absolutely against motion blur.

Environment texture quality doesn't impact performance much, with a ceiling of 5% using the Extreme setting. However, it does have a substantial impact on VRAM. Every GPU model has a different amount of VRAM, so it's important that you use Forza Horizon 5's benchmark to measure and manage its usage. In our testing, we found that Low-High had fairly minor bumps in VRAM, while Ultra used 1.55GB more than the High setting and Extreme demanded a further 1.5GB.

Meanwhile, environment geometry quality affects the density of objects in the environment, such as cacti, foliage, and rocks, and can have a surprisingly minor impact on performance. Every setting up to High, which only has a 1% frame rate cost, can be used with any environment texture quality setting. However, turning this up to Ultra or Extreme requires that the environment texture quality be turned up to Ultra as a minimum. For most people with at least 6GB of VRAM, we recommend the Ultra preset for both, which should incur a 6% cost in total.

To round out the last of the settings, lens effects, anisotropic filtering, and deformable terrain quality all have negligible impacts on performance and should be put on their highest respective modes. We don't recommend anyone use the resolution scaling option, and it's unfortunate that Playground Games was unable to implement a dynamic resolution scaler like on the console versions of the game. Ray tracing doesn't impact gameplay and is only used in the ForzaVista model viewer, which is a crying shame in our eyes. It'll cost you between 12-17% if you want to gawp at your collection with improved reflections.

Best Forza Horizon 5 settings for Steam Deck

• Graphics Preset: Medium
• AMD FSR: Quality
• Resolution: 1,200 x 800
• Frame Rate: 60

Forza Horizon 5 runs great on the Steam Deck using both the Medium and Low graphics presets. We recommend using the Medium preset alongside AMD FSR at the Deck's native resolution, which should result in a frame rate of just under 60fps.

To push this further, you can drop the preset to Low while maintaining the FSR setting, which results in a consistent 60fps, sometimes spiking even higher, although we would recommend locking to 60fps via the in-game menu.

You will need to log into an Xbox account, a task that still requires use of the touchscreen in a Steam keyboard, which is why the game doesn't have a verified rating. Forza Horizon 5 is otherwise a pretty perfect experience on the Steam Deck.

Forza Horizon 5 presets

• Very Low
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Ultra
• Extreme

Unlike some PC games, such as Back 4 Blood and New World, selecting one of Forza Horizon 5's presets won't make all the game's individual options adopt the same level of fidelity and will instead use a range of optimized settings. Although not every setting has the full range of options from Very Low to Extreme, we'll touch on them as and when they come up in our individual settings breakdown

If you're raring to hit the road, we think the High preset is the best starting position for most players. It enables you to experience most of the graphical technologies Forza offers, bar SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion) and Night Shadows. This preset also allows you to make use of your graphics card's ray tracing capabilities in the game's ForzaVista model viewer, if your GPU supports the tech.

Ultra does look a touch nicer, but will decrease your frame rate by about 23%, and we can only recommend those with gaming PCs akin to supercars even consider the Extreme preset, as it has a 41% performance cost in comparison to High. Shifting gears down to Medium will only net you an 8% increase, but it could be worth the trade-off if you're struggling to hit your target frame rate. We'd advise against using the Low or Very Low presets, and instead recommend tinkering with the swathe of individual settings to fine-tune your Forza Horizon 5 experience.

Forza Horizon 5 accessibility settings

In our interview with Mike Brown, creative director of Forza Horizon 5, he describes accessibility as "one of the core pillars that make up Forza Horizon 5, and great efforts and investments were made to ensure the development team understood its importance." Like other modern titles, the game presents a selection of accessibility settings to you before you even set foot (tyre?) in Mexico and can later be accessed via the 'Accessibility' tab in the game's settings menu.

Playground Games has implemented two fairly unique tools that should help make the game more accessible from a difficulty perspective. Players can now control the game's offline game speed and slow down proceedings to as much as 40%, allowing you to hit those lightning-fast top speeds without having the reflexes to match in order to keep the car under control. It also features a new 'Tourist' difficulty mode, which makes AI opponents wait for you, should you fall behind.

There are separate color blind settings for the interface and visuals, with sliders and presets for deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia, as well as a high contrast mode for the game's interface. There's also a setting that disables motion in background images.

A screen reader is included, in addition to voice chat, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text support. Subtitles can be enabled and customised in terms of size, background opacity, as well as keyword highlighting. Text size can also be increased across the board by up to 150%.

How we tested Forza Horizon 5

At PCGamesN, we use dedicated gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. The test rig used to play Mecha Break includes the following components: Intel Core i7-11700F, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB, 32GB of DDR4 3,200MHz RAM in a dual-channel configuration, and an MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Windows 11 64-bit.

We always run our testing first at 1,920 x 1,080 to identify the best settings for this entry-level resolution, then again at 2,560 x 1,440 using the same setup to gauge the difference in performance. Finally, we also test in 4K. We use CapFrameX to capture frame data and compare testing sessions.

Does Forza Horizon 5 need an SSD?

Forza Horizon 5 does not require an SSD. Due to the long loading times you can experience without one, particularly between events and when the open world is loading, we highly recommend that you upgrade if you still currently use a mechanical drive.

If you grab yourself the best gaming SSD from our buying guide for your existing gaming PC, it will really help keep game loading times in check while also providing some minor performance boosts.

How to monitor performance in Forza Horizon 5

If you want to keep an eye on performance in Forza Horizon 5, we have an easy method that works whether you're using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.

For Nvidia cards, ensure you have the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled, and then hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.

Alternatively, you can download free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView, to get a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.

With handheld gaming PCs, most will have a dedicated button to access a quick menu from which performance monitoring, sometimes called real-time monitoring, can be accessed.

If you're keen to increase your immersion while playing Forza Horizon 5, make sure you check out our best PC steering wheel buying guide. Meanwhile, to experience the stunning sound design of Horizon 5 in all its glory, you'll want one of the best gaming headset picks from our comprehensive guide.

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