Forza Horizon 5: best settings

It’s hard to make Forza Horizon 5 look bad, but some settings make the visuals and gameplay as sharp as possible. The minimum and recommended system requirements are well known, but what about the in-game settings? As a gorgeous open-world racing game that has only been out for a few months, some settings are more important than others. Given that it's a graphically intensive game, players will want a decent machine to run this beast.

Note: This article reflects the personal opinion of the writer.

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The ideal settings for Forza Horizon 5 in 2022

While there are six graphic presets (Very Low, Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Extreme) drivers can fine-tune many of the settings. Below are the optimal Forza Horizon 5 settings for drivers in 2022:

• Anisotropic Filtering: High
• Shadow Quality: High
• Night Shadows: On
• Motion Blur Quality: Ultra
• Environment Texture Quality: Medium
• Environment Geometry Quality: High
• MSAA: 2X
• FXAA: Off
• SSAO Quality: High
• Reflection Quality: Medium
• World Car Level of Detail: High
• Deformable Terrain Quality: Ultra
• SSR Quality: Medium
• Lens Effects: Ultra
• Shader Quality: High
• Particle Effects Quality: High
• Ray Tracing Quality: Off

Some of these settings are more relevant than the rest when it comes to gameplay experience. Ray Tracing, for example, has no real effect on gameplay and can be left off to put less strain on your system. It is only used in Forzavista, where players view their cars up close, but there won't be any impact on the races and their outcomes.

As far as the settings that make the biggest difference, these are shadows, shader quality, and reflection quality. The biggest change in performance goes to shader quality. Lowering this will give a massive boost to performance, but the graphics will suffer. If the game is stuttering a great deal, this should be lowered first.

Players can turn off shadows entirely to increase FPS, but visually it's a negative. If the player's PC is having a hard time handling the game, this could be a solid setting to lower or turn off. Turning the setting off completely removes all shadows in the game, however, and that may look awful.

Reflection quality can also be lowered, but the medium setting will be a nice middle ground between higher and lower settings. Particle effects are another setting worth noting. If this is set to Very Low, the sandstorms in the game will completely disappear. So unless that is the player's goal, leaving them on High or Medium will still look terrific.

Irrespective of the optimum settings a player chooses, Forza Horizon 5 is gorgeous to look at, and the vast open world perfectly captures the game's beauty.