Forza Horizon 3 was a technical showcase when it launched on the Xbox One and Windows 10 in late 2016. The Xbox One version, surprisingly ran at 1080p resolution at a rock solid 30 frames per second. Yesterday, Microsoft released a patch for the Xbox One X version which brings a ton of enhancements along with a huge boost to resolution.
Let’s get the elephant out of the room. Forza Horizon 3, despite being an open world and a extremely demanding title, runs at native 4K resolution and 30fps on the Xbox One X and as such the game looks remarkably better than its Xbox One counterpart. This massive increment in resolution is testament to the power of the 6 TFLOPs GPU being put to some amazing optimization and usage. However, the resolution boost is not the only improvement in this patch. There are a few extra parameters that have been improved upon, something that Xbox One X players will definitely appreciate.
Compared to the Xbox One version, the Xbox One X patch includes improved shadow resolutions, car reflections, increased LOD, draw distances and texture detail for environments and objects. Even the quality of motion blur along with anisotropic filtering has been given a bump.
So overall, the Xbox One X version is head and shoulders above the Xbox One build. Forza Horizon 3 is perhaps a showcase title for the Xbox One X. Granted that Forza Motorsport 7 looks better in some aspects, but the open world nature, the accompanying physics and the dynamic elements makes Forza Horizon 3 a rather intriguing title on the Xbox One X. A native 4K resolution along with several improvements in visual parameters would have entailed a number of optimizations and some brilliant code logic, something PlayGround Games have achieved mastery in by this point.