Five updates later, Forza fixes major issue for PC players

The Forza Motorsport launch on PC was marred by performance complaints from players, and in the upcoming February update, one of the major concerns will finally be fixed.

It doesn’t matter if you have the best gaming CPU or the best graphics card, no one was safe from instability in Forza Motorsport. The biggest reported issue that is yet to be addressed is CPU spikes, where monitoring software would report 100% CPU usage, causing throttling and ultimately full game crashes.

With update five – due next month – this issue is said to be resolved, according to the patch notes. More surprising is the sheer volume of hardware-related issues that still need a fix almost four months later.

Based on the list of fixes, it appears that if you had your settings too high, turning them down would have no impact on performance, effectively locking you into poor performance. In a slightly quirkier issue, if you were playing Forza on an integrated GPU, it wasn’t possible to play in full screen mode.

The proposed PC-specific fixes to resolve the above issues, and more, for the February Forza Motorsport update include:

• Numerous under-the-hood improvements to reduce CPU spikes and better utilize the GPU, helping to improve frame rate consistency while driving.
• Fixed numerous crash scenarios caused by multi-threaded rendering.
• Fixed being unable to use full-screen mode when using a PC with an iGPU.
• Fixed erratic frame rate after reverting a video settings change.
• Improved mouse navigation by allowing RMB to behave like esc / B to navigate back through menus.
• Fixed an issue on PC where players would see no performance boost when switching from a high-quality mode to low-quality.
• Fixed an issue where objects were missing from car reflections in Photo Mode and Forzavista.
• Added a check for GPU support of D3D12 Enhanced Barrier feature to application startup. Error code AP205 corresponds to the detected lack of support. The client will attempt to find a device that has the required features and will report a “failed to create graphics device” modal if none are found. 

Hopefully, with Turn 10 having put a lot of resources and effort into update five, ensuring that it addresses the biggest issues for PC players, there should be no need for such expansive fixes moving forward.

You can check out our Forza Motorsport review to read our thoughts on the latest in this series that has produced some of the best racing games available on PC or console.