What’s the best Forza Motorsport graphics mode?

Forza Motorsport is a great-looking game whatever graphics settings you choose  from Performance, Performance Ray Tracing or Visual mode. But Turn 10 Studios has managed to get the game running at 60 frames per second on an Xbox Series X while delivering ray-traced lighting. That’s a big deal. But with a trade-off between resolution, frame-rate and graphics quality, which setting should you use? We’ve also covered the Xbox Series S here, though naturally PC gamers will have to take into account their own hardware configuration in order to get the best performance from the game.

Is Forza Motorsport Performance, Ray Tracing or Visual mode best? 

Forza Motorsport Performance mode

The game’s default display mode is ‘Performance’. On Xbox Series X, this gives you dynamic resolution scaling targeting 4K while using ‘baked’ Ambient Occlusion lighting and screen space reflections in order to achieve its still-impressive looks, all at a lovely, smooth 60fps. This is arguably the one to go for if you want to take the game seriously, so you get the best resolution along with the best frame-rate. 

Forza Motorsport Performance Ray Tracing

Next, we have Performance Ray Tracing. This mode enables Ray Tracing and locks the frame rate to a silky-smooth 60fps on Xbox Series X, while still targeting 4K on that machine. The reality is likely to be below that in races with all 24 cars on-screen, but the effect is still superb. This is the mode we’d recommend for enjoying the visual splendour while still playing the game seriously.

Forza Motorsport Visual mode

Finally, we have Visual mode. This targets 4K but still uses dynamic scaling, though it’s likely to remain much higher resolution than in scenes with ray tracing enabled. It also appears to add extra texture quality - for instance in the surface of the track there, and dirt on the advertising hoardings. However, to achieve all the extra detail and lighting quality, the game runs at a still-solid 30 frame per second. Seasoned racers will notice the drop in fluidity immediately, and it does make chasing fast lap times that much harder as your have half the visual information to process due to being shown fewer frames. Some TVs can add in frames to give the impression of 60fps fluidity while retaining this detail, but doing so (called post-processing) can take several milliseconds to compute, resulting in input lag when you try to steer the car, which any racing fan will tell you is an absolute no-no. Still, if your TV has Game Mode, the game looks great like this, and you will get used to the 30fps action pretty quickly if you stick with it. 

Forza Motorsport Xbox Series S graphic options

The smaller of the two current-gen Xbox machines doesn’t support Ray Tracing during gameplay, which is a shame, but understandable given the performance overhead. Similarly, Ambient Occlusion lighting is always ‘baked’ instead of the more organic real-time computation. As a result, you get 60fps in Performance Mode, targeting 1080p. Alternatively, Performance Mode gives you 1440p resolution at 30fps. That’s a pretty big drop in fluidity for not much resolution gain, and without Ray Tracing it must be said there’s not much reason to choose this option. So if you have an Xbox Series S, your best bet is to stick with Performance Mode. It looks great, even without Ray Tracing, and runs beautifully smoothly. For the best results, play on a 1080p TV set rather than 4K, as you’ll get native resolution, which always looks better than post-processed upscaling.