Forza Horizon 2 looks absolutely amazing. The original game was one of my favorite racing games of last generation, so I have been pretty damned excited for this new one, but so far, all of my excitement has been centered only on the game’s actual gameplay aspects. As it turns out, there is some very impressive technology powering this game too, and now that the demo has been released, and the tech experts at Digital Foundry have had their hands on it, we find out exactly how impressive.
“Inspection of the demo shows that Forza Horizon 2 delivers its visual punch with a crisp native 1080p resolution, as promised by the developers earlier in the year,” says the official Digital Foundry analysis, “The anti-aliasing solution is also given a boost over that of Forza 5 via the use of 4x MSAA (multi-sampling anti-aliasing) – a bandwidth-heavy choice that we rarely see in use on console. Coverage is decent, with less shimmering on distant objects compared to Forza 5.”
What’s even more impressive here is that in spite of this level of technical mastery powering what seems to be a fairly expansive open world, there is nary a framerate drop in sight.
“Impressively, despite the demanding open-world set-up and an avalanche of advanced rendering effects, Forza Horizon 2 holds a solid 30fps throughout the demo without ever dropping a single frame during gameplay, no matter how carelessly we ploughed through the scenery and collided with other vehicles – driving feels smooth and responsive in a variety of weather and road conditions.”
On the whole? Digital Foundry sounded mightily impressed with the entire experience:
“In the limited demo environment we’ve only seen a snapshot of what Forza Horizon 2 has to offer, but our first impressions are highly positive. While it’s hard to make judgements on the full scope of the game from just a brief hands-on, what’s been shown so far certainly exceeds the original Forza Horizon in all areas, while substantially ramping up the level of detail and effects work in line with what is expected from a current/next-gen release.”
So just in case your purchase decisions are dictated by, I don’t know, graphics and stuff instead of the game itself, well, now you have a reason to buy Forza Horizon 2.
