Forget your Xbox – Forza Horizon 6’s ray-tracing on PC has me planning a trip to Japan

It’s always a fun moment when a big game drops – especially if you’re playing it on PC, and get the run the gauntlet of checking how it performs on your hardware. Forza Horizon 6 stands as an obvious example, since it’s both the latest in perhaps the most popular modern racing franchise and a torch-bearer for visual beauty.

I’ve had access to the game for a few days after Nvidia sent a copy through so that I could see how it leverages some of the latest graphics tech, and it’s lived up to lofty expectations, while serving up more of the excellent explorative driving that the series is known for.

In fact, it has a really impressive overlap with another massive game set in Japan from last year, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, in that there’s one key bit of ray-tracing tech that transforms how the game looks. That’s ray-traced global illumination, which effectively turns ray-tracing on for the global lighting in the game’s world, making the sun behave way more naturally as it bathes vistas in light.

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With dynamic weather and some absolutely gorgeous locales to explore, the moment I went into my settings menu to toggle global illumination on, the game went from a solid outlook graphically to a totally gorgeous one.

Crucially, it also ships with auto frame-generation active as part of DLSS 4.5, which means that even at 4K resolution, I’ve been able to get it performing steadily at 60fps on effectively maxed-out settings. More generally, though, I’ve gone for 1440p since I play at a desktop, and with auto frame-gen and an 80fps cap I’ve been playing smoothly and without annoying latency.

Forza Horizon 6 – Official Launch Trailer – YouTube

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The fact is that some genres are better suited to frame generation than others, and the same goes for DLSS sharpening, but having never really used it on a racing title before, it seems like another winner to me. I’m not noticing any ghosting or artefacts, and the ray-tracing when cranked up is revelatory.

Reflections are obviously a key factor here, too, and they’re absolutely beautiful if you have a rig capable of powering it all. There’s still something a little magical about driving past the Tokyo Tower, for instance, and seeing it in the reflection of your car boot as you drive away, and it’s just about the perfect demonstration of real reflections rather than screen-space fakery.

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Beyond the visuals, what I’ve seen of Horizon 6 has been lovely so far – with its opening as bombastic as ever, but also with a quick on-ramp to its satisfying gameplay loop of exploring and racing. I’ve already become addicted to smashing experience boards and mascots, and I can’t pretend it all isn’t a little familiar.

That said, the game’s got a lovely addition in the form of “day trips”, which see you go on sightseeing tours that are more slow-paced, before ending them with a race. I’ve loved the ones I’ve found so far – and they do a great job of spotlighting the extraordinary detail of the areas the developers have built, and their realism.

I also like how the game is more stingy with high-performance cars early on, making it feel more like a journey to get access to hypercars. Progression is a huge part of the motivation to explore this sort of massive driving game, as any Gran Turismo head will appreciate.

Funnily enough, though, this all adds up to something very real-world for me – an actual trip to Japan. I’ve been wanting to go for years, and right around the time I got access to Horizon 6, I managed to book flights for a 2027 trip, which is deeply exciting. It’s not necessarily just the game that got me revved up enough to book, but seeing its beautiful rendering of the country really did help get me even more hyped.

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