Forza Horizon 5 Ray Tracing Mod

Forza Horizon 5 PC modded to add ray tracing in-game

Dramatic improvements for photo mode too.

Forza Horizon 5 ships on PC, Xbox Serial X and Series Southward with hardware-accelerated ray tracing support to embellish vehicle reflections - but merely in Forza Vista and garage modes. This is something of a shame, especially when photo mode in particular stands to benefit immensely. Yet, on the DF Supporter Program, one of our backers - Frosticles - produced an RT mod for the PC version (with an assist from Rotab for the Windows Store version), assuasive for reflections to run in all modes of the game. And then, how beneficial is it and what is the functioning cost? Could information technology be enabled in time to come on Xbox Series X?

To begin with, let's clarify how standard reflections work in Forza Horizon 5, because it's fair to say that fifty-fifty without RT, they look dandy. If you can imagine six invisible cameras attached to the thespian vehicle, capturing imagery and mapping it onto a sphere, you get some idea of how the reflections are generated. Effectively, you're looking at cube-map reflections generated continuously in real-time. These reflections are non perspective-correct, just it's close enough and works well enough.

Here's how ray tracing in Forza Horizon 5 looks enabled in all areas of the game - and the performance toll for using.

Hardware accelerated ray tracing further embellishes effect by adding RT reflections of the vehicle onto the motorcar itself, something the cube-maps can't do. It's important to stress that information technology is but the car - not the environment - existence traced and certainly not other cars. Anything outside of the role player vehicle that makes its fashion into FH5's reflections all comes from that existent-time cube-map image. The specific style that the reflections work also means that 'reflections inside reflections' are possible - then wing mirrors reflected in the door glass 'piece of work', though in this case, it'southward the cube-map from the mirror that is being reflected.

In many scenarios, the changes can be subtle - especially in-game - but shut-upward to the car, the difference tin can exist extraordinary, so using the mod in photo-mode tin exist highly beneficial in getting a much better shot. In fact, the thumbnail image on the video (and the article thumbnail on the front-page) are based on a Playground press image, which does have ray tracing enabled: y'all can see the vehicle reflected in the mounted lights at the front of the car. Information technology'due south besides worth mentioning that the pre-rendered cine on the introduction as well apply the effect. And why not? The cars are the stars of the show and hardware-accelerated ray tracing makes these beautiful models look even better.

In my original PC tech review, I wasn't hugely impressed past PC scalability beyond the Series Ten quality mode, but engaging RT offers a cool upgrade - simply it also has its limitations, of course. For starters, in-game, primarily you are seeing your machine just from the back. This means that the impact of self-reflections varies according to the pattern of the vehicle. Secondly, hardware RT does not work within the vehicles - so the rear-view mirror does not reflect the interior of the car, for instance. The final limitation is that when say that but the player auto's detail is reflected, nosotros mean information technology. The thespian model itself is never reflected. This is a bit of a shame for a potential in-game or photo mode application, but would have no impact for FH5's intended use in Forza Vista or the garage.

However, in addition to forcing RT on in all modes, the mod as well access other parameters. The ray-per-pixel or reflection setting can exist tweaked to increase or subtract reflection fidelity. One ray per pixel gives a good upshot, merely moving beyond that effectively anti-aliases the reflection and adds a skilful deal of quality - at a cost to performance, of course. Another option is to increase the number of times rays bounce, to a higher place the default one bounce, adding further realism and quality. It's fascinating to test RT in all modes and to tweak the available parameters in Playground'due south implementation - it gives y'all some idea of scalability and tweakability in what is clearly a work-in-progress technology.

Only let's say y'all own FH5 on PC and want to give it a become - what's the operation cost? Beginning of all, you patently demand an Nvidia Turing, Ampere or AMD RDNA 2 GPU to make this characteristic work at all. And the cost of the feature depends on your GPU, what the rendering resolution is, and how close to the car you are. For my testing, I chose the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT and used the game's PC benchmark at 4K resolution. On the Nvidia side, RT reflections adds ane.7ms of render time in its default configuration. On the AMD card, it adds about 2.9ms. Bearing in mind that to run at 60fps, we're aiming for a xvi.7ms render upkeep at the maximum, this is a significant cost and clearly, maintaining 4K60 is going to be more viable on the RTX 3080.

Could RT exist enabled on Xbox Series X? Bearing in heed that the RX 6800 XT is considerably more than powerful, that ii.9ms render cost would ascent significantly, so perhaps it's not viable. Nevertheless, PC gaming is all about options and delivering forward-looking features - and with that in mind, I would promise to see Playground Games incorporate it equally an official feature in future. The mod seems to work quite well - the only issue I plant concerned foursquare patch artefacts on the rear car window of 1 specific vehicle. In the here and now though, it's obviously early days for RT in ForzaTech - but I'll be curious to see how the technology evolves for the upcoming Forza Motorsport.

Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2021-forza-horizon-5-in-game-ray-tracing-mod

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