Forza Horizon 4 is a Beautiful Open World Racer!
12This is my first Forza Horizon game. I've always wanted to play them but never owned an XBOX One and while they've been out on PC for awhile Forza 4 only recently came to Steam a few months ago. While the initial price was still $80 CAD (kinda heavy for a 2 year old game!) it was recently on sale for $50 CAD at the time of this video. This is a little more reasonable and now that I've played it I can say it was worth every penny! The game offers a beautiful open world version of Great Brittan complete with day/night and season cycles with a huge selection of cars from a wide variety of makes.
The game runs great on PC. I'm able to play it at 1440p Ultra settings on my mid-range AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT 6GB GPU. By default the game was set to a locked 85Hz with V-Sync on and this makes the 60FPS video look choppy with a lot of stutter. I didn't notice right away as it looked fine while I was playing so I only noticed later while watching back the videos. The game gave me the option to lock the frame rate to 60Hz instead (or turn off V-Sync) and that would have been best for recording video. My monitor is a 1440p gaming monitor with 170Hz Freesync variable refresh rate so 85Hz looks perfectly smooth on the monitor but when trying to record at 60FPS in the background that's going to cause serious stutter in the video! I also had the AMD Re-live recording settings at the default 30Mb/s bitrate and excessive MPEG compression can be seen at times.
I later recorded a separate video at 1440p with the bitrate set to 80Mb/s and this not only looks smoother (I may have had V-Sync turned off by this point as I did eventually disable it so the game would no longer be forcing the engine to run at 85Hz) but there's also a lot less compression artifacts thanks to the higher bitrate. Basically it's smoother and sharper so a little more representative of how the game looked while I was playing it. I'll upload that RAW video with no editing separately. That video is 10 minutes long and 5.25GB in size. This 15 minute video by contrast was only 1.36GB! Initially I was worried that playing while recording at 1440p would be too demanding compared to 1080p but turns out it may have been the better option all along.
Anyway, don't let the stutter in this video worry you. If you have a decent mid-range gaming PC the game runs very smooth except while loading transitions between races (there's a lot of stutter while loading!) but not once racing or in the open world!