After years of awful performance on Motorsport (because my PC is admittedly getting pretty old now), I booted up Horizon without much hope. Imagine my surprise…

Smooth 60fps.

Sure, I don’t have all the bells and whistles enabled and I play at 1920×1080, but this game is proof as far as I care that the only reason I can’t run modern games is bad optimisation, not my PC being weak. If I can cruise through a semi-realistic Japan at 120mph I should be able to load in a building across the street (looking at you OUTER WORLDS 2 and your UE5 obsession…).

I run all my other games with exactly the same “low” requirements (1920×1080, 60fps) and yet time after time modern games have released in a state which simply fails to meet that requirement.

I understand that people with £5k PC’s need fancy words and graphs to make them feel the cost was worth it and their tools are being used well, but it was starting to feel like performance was a secondary consideration for everybody else…

Until Forza Horizon 6.

Proof that optimisation can surpass 5+ years of advancement

My specs are getting on a bit now:

• Processor AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core Processor, 3400 Mhz
• RAM 16GB DDR4
• GPU NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

It’s a PC built for purpose, but still 8 years out of date by modern standards. The fact it’s not DDR5 is unhinged. In some ways you’d be forgiven for saying I shouldn’t even expect to be able to run modern games…

But here’s the thing:

Battlefront 2 from 2017.

Batman Arkham City from 2011.

Battlefield 1 from 2016.

Games never needed to look better than this.

They ran smoothly, looked great and two of them even supported large multiplayer servers on top of that.

I don’t feel represented in modern gaming graphics setting menus because frankly, I never needed any game to look or run better than those examples (and countless others from before 2020).

I understand some people do, and there should be Ultra Gigia Kraken settings for those guys…

But a 2026 release’s “Low” or “Medium” modes should have no reason, none at all, to not be optimised enough to run as well and look as good as a TEN YEAR OLD game.

Forza Horizon 6’s benchmark actually seems to work

When you run the benchmark in Horizon 6 you actually come out feeling like the game is optimised for your PC – not just having everything thrown on “Lowest” because your GPU is 8 years old.

I actually managed to get “Medium” preset but with some other fancy bits disabled. Meanwhile my partner’s substantially newer PC managed Medium but with all the extras enabled.

Someone with an Uber PC would be looking for Ultra preset with everything enabled on 4K ultrawide, but the fact that the game provides both of those players a comparable game experience in terms of performance is frankly newsworthy. It’s not a question of which is better, it’s simply a matter of providing both options.

The most magical of achievements: Player choice.

I hope more developers focus on optimisation to this degree, making modern gaming look as good as it needs to while running buttery smooth, with the options to crank everything up for the real sickos.