Forza Motorsport PC Mod Finally Makes the Game Look as Good as the Trailers

The latest Forza Motorsport is a very polarizing game, as so many high-profile releases are today. At launch, it was widely criticized for its experimental career mode which locked key vehicle upgrades behind a leveling system. Sometimes it looked phenomenal in screenshots; other times, decidedly not. And performance on PC was anything but consistent. Months later, developer Turn 10 Studios has addressed many of these issues, yet the game still doesn’t look as stunning in motion as it does in Microsoft’s own trailers. Thankfully, a new mod gets Forza Motorsport closer to that visual target, unlocking the potential of what was a very highly anticipated racing sim.

The experts at Digital Foundry detail the mod in a recent video, comparing how the game looks at its maximum settings on PC with its presentation when these formerly hidden options are applied. Turn 10 Studios notably uses ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) in its marketing for Motorsport to this day, which is part of why the title looks so much better in prepared cinematic videos than in actual gameplay. This technology allows light and color to bounce off multiple surfaces and blend more like it does in the real world. With an easy tweak detailed in DF’s video, you can turn this feature on in races in Motorsport, and it touches just about everything you see on the screen.

Intricate materials in cars, like metal exhaust pipes and aero components that normally would be obscured in shadow, now receive and reflect light more naturally. Forza Motorsport already supports ray-traced reflections on highly glossy surfaces, like windows and car paint. But this mod allows more diffuse materials, like matte carbon fiber, to reflect surroundings as well. Ray-traced reflections on these kinds of surfaces are typically more resource-intensive to display, which may help explain why they’re currently not possible in the game by default.

The mod incorporates all of these enhancements inside car interiors, as well as out on the circuit and across trackside objects. The steel tubing of a roll cage near the ceiling of a car’s cabin, which would normally remain totally shadowed in gameplay, now reflects light shining back at it off the car’s hood and asphalt ahead. Advertising boards on the ground now pick up the green of adjacent grass, or the red of a nearby curb. These tweaks don’t make a massive difference in isolation. But taken comprehensively, across an entire scene, they give the whole environment far more depth than you’d notice otherwise.

This brings us to why players still need to employ a mod to unlock them, almost a year since launch. Turn 10 said RTGI would eventually come to Motorsport on PC before the game was released last October, but that still hasn’t happened yet. Don’t hold your breath for such visual delights on current Xbox Series consoles—they can’t handle anything like it. Neither can the PlayStation 5, which is why Gran Turismo 7 only incorporates ray tracing in menus and replays, at 30 frames per second.

Digital Foundry notes that these advanced techniques enabled by the mod also don’t behave appropriately in all scenarios. For example, they break during night races and reduce the intensity of light and reflections on a wet track. They also produce significant visual noise around some metallic surfaces, and Turn 10 could still be working to correct that in development. The ultra-high-end settings go beyond lighting to maximize foliage, ground cover, and spectator density, and the net result of all of these enhancements is a considerable hit to performance and average frame-per-second counts, especially when playing from the cockpit view.

So, these features may need more time in the oven before Turn 10 deems them fit for sim racers and their suitably premium rigs. That’s another thing: I, with my RTX 3070 GPU and Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, can now enjoy very respectable performance in Forza Motorsport without resorting to potato textures, but RTGI is certainly a bridge too far for my machine if I want to retain a constant 60 FPS. Unless you have cream-of-the-crop silicon, it’s best not to get your hopes up. But the mod itself is painless enough to implement, and if you’re interested, the video explains how to sample it first-hand.

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