Forza Horizon 6 Best Settings Guide for Max FPS & Graphics

Forza Horizon 6 is easily the biggest graphical leap the series has ever made. Playground Games clearly pushed their engine to the absolute limit this time around, delivering massive improvements in lighting, reflections, environmental detail, and overall immersion. From neon-lit Tokyo highways at night to countryside roads during sunrise, FH6 constantly feels like a showcase title for modern hardware.

In this guide, I’ll go over the best Forza Horizon 6 settings to help you maximize both image quality and performance. I’ll explain the best upscaling methods, ray tracing settings, optimization tweaks, and which options hurt FPS the most so you know exactly what to lower first.

If you’d rather skip the early grind and jump straight into the best cars, races, and content, check out the Forza Horizon 6 Accounts at Gamer Choice.

Best Forza Horizon 6 Settings Quick Summary:

• Stick to your monitor’s native resolution and use upscaling technology instead of lowering render resolution.
• Use Fullscreen mode and disable VSync if you want the best possible input responsiveness.
• DLSS Quality and DLAA are the strongest options for Nvidia cards, while FSR Quality works best for AMD and other GPUs.
• Frame Generation should only be enabled if your baseline framerate already stays above 60 FPS consistently.
• Raytraced Global Illumination has a much bigger visual impact than RT reflections.
• RT reflections look especially impressive in Tokyo, but they heavily reduce performance.
• Shadow Quality, Volumetric Fog, Shader Quality, and Car LOD are some of the biggest FPS killers.

Best Forza Horizon 6 Video Settings

Visual presentation has always been one of the strongest aspects of the Horizon franchise, but Forza Horizon 6 takes things much further than previous entries. Since the game only launched on current-generation platforms, the developers had far more freedom to fully push graphical fidelity without needing to compromise for older hardware.

The result is honestly stunning. Night races through Tokyo look incredible thanks to the dense lighting and reflections, while countryside roads during sunrise or stormy weather showcase just how advanced the environmental rendering has become. It’s one of the most visually impressive racing games currently available.

Below are the best Forza Horizon 6 video settings:

Setting	Best Option	Explanation
Resolution	Native	Never set lower than your native res. If you’re on a potato PC, it’s better to use image reconstruction technologies in performance mode.
Frame rate	Unlocked with VRR, capped if your PC struggles to maintain a high framerate	If your PC has problems going above 60 fps, it’s better to cap it. This way, you’ll free up some power, and it’ll perform better. Just do it through RTSS or Nvidia Control Panel, not within the game itself.
VSync	Off	You don’t want that in a racing game.
Fullscreen	On	Better performance + lower input lag.
Show FPS	Up to preference	Good for testing, though it lacks detail.
Motion Blur	Up to preference	I feel that Forza lacks a feeling of speed, and motion blur adds a bit of it.
Anti-Aliasing	AMD FSR 3.1.5 AA: Quality	If you’re not on an Nvidia GPU, this is the best image reconstruction technology.
NVIDIA DLSS Technologies	On: Quality / DLAA. Framegen: Off. Reflex: On.	Let’s be honest, Nvidia’s image reconstruction is objectively the best. If you need better performance, leave it on Quality. If you want a sharper image, use DLAA, though it’s more taxing. Do not turn on Framegen unless you can go above 60 at all times, as it will tank your input lag.

Most of the general video settings are preference-based and don’t dramatically affect performance outside of image reconstruction technologies like DLSS and FSR.

If you’re unsure which upscaling preset to use, here’s a simple guideline:

• 1080p: Quality
• 1440p: Balanced
• 4K: Performance

DLAA deserves special mention because it delivers some of the cleanest image quality available in the game. If your GPU has enough power headroom, DLAA can produce an image that actually looks sharper and cleaner than native resolution while also reducing shimmering and image noise.

For example, if you’re running something extremely powerful like an RTX 5090 at 1440p, DLAA is absolutely worth enabling. The image quality improvement is immediately noticeable, especially during nighttime driving where lighting clarity and distant details become far more stable.

For players using Nvidia GPUs, DLSS Quality remains the sweet spot overall. It gives excellent visual clarity while recovering a solid amount of FPS. FSR Quality is the best alternative for AMD users or anyone without access to DLSS.

I’d also strongly recommend avoiding lower render resolutions whenever possible. Forza Horizon 6 scales surprisingly well with modern upscaling technologies, meaning you’re usually better off staying at native resolution and letting DLSS or FSR handle the performance boost instead.

Best Forza Horizon 6 Graphics Settings

Now let’s move on to the actual graphics settings that define how good Forza Horizon 6 looks during gameplay.

Although many settings remain similar to those from Forza Horizon 5, the visual improvements in FH6 are extremely noticeable. The lighting model is significantly more advanced, reflections are more realistic, weather effects are denser, and overall scene depth feels far richer than before.

One thing I really appreciate is that Playground Games included a built-in benchmark mode. It’s surprisingly useful for testing different configurations and quickly seeing which settings are causing performance drops on your hardware.

The optimized settings below should be treated as a starting point rather than strict rules. Every system behaves differently, and depending on your target FPS, GPU, and resolution, you may want to increase or lower certain options further.

Below are the best Forza Horizon 6 graphics settings:

Settings	Best Option	Explanation
Car Level of Detail	Ultra	Extreme takes too much performance, but makes your cars look uh-mazing. Influences various details and car geometry of cars OTHER than yours.
Environment Texture Quality	Extreme	Influences how much VRAM the textures occupy. If you see that your game starts dropping frames randomly, lower this setting first.
Environment Geometry Quality	High/Ultra	Influences the draw distance and tesselation. I’m personally willing to sacrifice frames for more realistic geometry detail and less pop-in, but High is a great middle-ground. Bear in mind that this setting is usually CPU rather than GPU-bound.
Car Reflection Quality	Ultra	Influences the quality of cubemaps. Doesn’t influence performance, but there’s no point in going higher than ultra.
Screen Space Reflections Quality	Extreme	While SSR can be quite buggy in games of other genres, in racing, it's almost unnoticeable because of the way SSR works. Forza's SSR is quite good, and while it’s not even close to RT reflections, surprisingly enough, it consumes no performance at all.
Raytraced Reflections Quality	High or Off	The main draw of RT reflections is the world reflections in the buildings. In the current release state, the setting feels kinda off. It has this grainy look to it, which could've been fixed by ray reconstruction, but it's nowhere to be found here. It also eats around 15-20% of your performance.
Shadow Quality	High or Off	Shadows are quite taxing. High is enough to get rid of the fuzzy visuals while creating naturally softer shadows, while Ultra makes them sharper and a bit unrealistic, while eating around 15% performance.
Night Shadows	Medium or Off	This setting in Forza traditionally eats a lot of FPS. Night shadows let the headlights cast shadows on objects. For instance, a civilian car driving past you will cast a shadow behind it with this setting turned on. If you want that little bit of immersion, turn it to medium, but I'd recommend it off.
Screen Space GI Quality	High or Off	Basically, ambient occlusion. The only way you'll see the difference is by switching between High and Ultra, where it seems that the resolution of occlusion increases and the corner shadows become more accurate.
Raytraced GI Quality	Medium or Off	Makes the world feel deeper with foliage casting shadows and overall a more believable volumetric light diffusion, especially during dusk and dawn. It also eats around 20% of your performance on High. While High has the cleanest visuals, Medium offers much better performance, taking only around 5-7% of your fps, with some minor draws like foliage shadows looking smudgy.
Shader Quality	Ultra	Very large umbrella setting that includes a ton of various effects that make the world seem more real and less plastic. It can be framerate-hungry, but I don’t recommend setting it any lower than High.
Deformable Terrain Quality	Extreme	No performance cost, makes snow and sand look more realistic when being deformed by tires.No performance cost, makes snow and sand look more realistic when being deformed by tires.
Particle Effects Quality	Ultra	Increases the particle resolution, with no performance cost.
Volumetric Fog Quality	High or Ultra	Influences the fog resolution. IIRC, it also makes the clouds look better.
Lens Effects	Ultra	Creates a nice effect of looking through the camera lens.
Motion Blur Quality	Extreme	Honestly didn’t notice any visual or performance difference.

As mentioned earlier, these settings work best as a foundation. From there, continue tweaking individual options until you find the perfect balance between visuals and framerate for your setup.

Personally, I think FH6 still looks fantastic even after reducing a few heavy settings. The game’s art direction and lighting quality are strong enough that you don’t need to max everything out to achieve an impressive image.

Most Expensive Graphics Settings in Forza Horizon 6

Forza Horizon 6 is actually very well optimized overall, especially considering how advanced the visuals are. Still, there are several settings that massively impact performance and should be the first things you adjust if you need extra FPS.

While optimizing the game, I highly recommend using the built-in benchmark alongside RivaTuner Statistics Server and MSI Afterburner or RTSS monitoring tools. The in-game benchmark gives useful summary graphs, but real-time monitoring makes it much easier to identify exactly where framerate drops happen.

Below are the most performance-heavy settings in Forza Horizon 6:

Raytraced Global Illumination

This is by far the most demanding setting in the entire game, but it also delivers the biggest visual improvement. High-quality RT GI dramatically improves scene depth, indirect lighting, shadow accuracy, and environmental realism.

The difference becomes especially noticeable during nighttime driving or when entering heavily lit urban areas. Even on the High setting, the image quality jump is massive.

If your system can handle it, this should absolutely take priority over RT reflections.

Raytraced Reflections Quality

RT reflections are the second-largest FPS killer in the game. They mainly improve reflective surfaces like windows, wet roads, and vehicle bodies.

The most obvious showcase area is Tokyo, where skyscraper windows finally display accurate reflections instead of screen-space approximations. It looks fantastic when standing still or during slower drives through the city.

That said, during high-speed gameplay you often won’t notice the effect nearly as much, which is why I personally value RT GI more overall.

Shadow Quality

As expected, shadow rendering remains expensive in FH6. Higher shadow presets noticeably reduce performance, especially in dense environments with many light sources.

According to my testing, the highest shadow setting can reduce performance by roughly 15%, making it one of the easiest areas to optimize without massively hurting visuals.

High shadows still look excellent and are usually the best compromise.

Volumetric Fog Quality

Volumetric fog can consume around 10% of your performance at maximum settings, yet the visual difference between High and Extreme isn’t particularly dramatic.

If you dislike noisy or pixelated fog effects, High is a very solid middle ground that maintains good image quality while saving a decent chunk of FPS.

Shader Quality

Shader Quality affects multiple rendering systems simultaneously, which means increasing it has a fairly broad performance impact.

Ultra looks great, but High is usually the smarter option for most systems. If you’re heavily GPU-limited and desperately need extra performance, Medium is still acceptable visually.

Car Level of Detail

The Extreme Car LOD setting is surprisingly demanding considering how little visual improvement it provides over Ultra.

Unless you’re taking cinematic screenshots or using extremely high-end hardware, Ultra is the much better choice here.

Overall, if you have enough GPU power to use ray tracing, prioritize Raytraced Global Illumination before anything else. RT reflections certainly look impressive, but GI improves the entire image all the time rather than only during reflective moments.

It adds far more atmosphere, depth, and realism to the world, making Forza Horizon 6 feel substantially more immersive during regular gameplay.

F.A.Q.

What are the best Forza Horizon 6 settings for FPS?

For the best framerate, use Fullscreen mode, disable VSync, and use an external FPS limiter if needed. Lower Shadow Quality from Extreme, reduce Volumetric Fog, and disable ray tracing features if your GPU starts struggling. These changes usually provide the biggest FPS improvements without massively hurting image quality.

Should I use DLSS in Forza Horizon 6?

Yes, DLSS is absolutely worth using if you have a compatible Nvidia GPU. DLSS Quality mode delivers excellent image clarity while boosting performance significantly. In many situations, it can even look cleaner than native resolution. If your GPU has enough headroom, DLAA is an even better option for maximum visual quality.

Should I turn on Frame Generation in Forza Horizon 6?

Frame Generation mainly depends on your base framerate. If your system can consistently stay above 60 FPS before enabling it, then Frame Generation can work very well. Lower settings like 2x tend to feel smoother and more stable on mid-range systems. If your PC already runs the game at around 90 to 100 FPS, higher Frame Generation modes can massively increase framerate further.

What graphics settings hurt FPS the most in Forza Horizon 6?

The most demanding settings are Raytraced Global Illumination, Raytraced Reflections, Shadow Quality, Volumetric Fog, Shader Quality, and Extreme Car Level of Detail. These options can heavily reduce performance, especially at higher resolutions, so they should be the first settings you tweak when optimizing FPS.