Forza Horizon 6 is still a couple months away, launching on May 19, but Playground Games has revealed the PC system requirements, and they’re surprisingly modest.
Just like Crimson Desert’s PC version earlier this month, Playground Games has released a detailed chart, detailing out several levels of performance. And while, of course, there are some pretty beefy requirements on the high-end for the 4K ray tracing preset, the lower-end configurations are reasonable – only calling for an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti or a Radeon RX 6500 XT to run the game on low settings.
Playground Games also says that the Steam Deck and the ROG Xbox Ally will be supported, but the chart doesn’t say what graphics preset, resolution or frame rate these handheld gaming PCs will be able to hit. My gut says that they’ll be running at low settings, and targeting 30 fps, but I’ll be testing it myself once the game actually comes out in May.
Either way, though, Forza Horizon 5 ran extremely well on most gaming PCs, so it’s likely that Forza Horizon 6, running on an updated version of the same ForzaTech engine, will follow in its footsteps. In the 5 years since Forza Horizon 5 launched, though, there have been plenty of new graphics technologies that have come out, and it looks like this new game will support most of them, including DLSS 4 multi-frame generation and FSR Redstone.
How Will It Run on Handhelds?
While Playground Games said both the Steam Deck and the Xbox Ally would be able to run Forza Horizon 6, it didn’t really clarify how well it’ll run. However, we can look at the minimum spec to get a pretty good idea.
Forza Horizon 6 calls for a Ryzen 5 1600 at the low-end, which is basically ancient by today’s standards. And while it’s a desktop processor with a much higher power budget than the Z2 in the Xbox Ally, it probably performs similarly.
The bigger difference is going to be in the graphics performance. The game calls for a GTX 1650, a Radeon RX 6500 XT or an Intel Arc A380 to run the game at 1080p with low settings. None of those graphics cards are particularly powerful by today’s standards – or even by the standards of their time, honestly – but they’re still a bit more powerful than what’s found in the Steam Deck.
But if those graphics cards are going to be able to squeeze 60 fps out of the game, I could totally see the Steam Deck able to coast with 30-40 fps with low settings at 800p. That’s not ideal for a high-speed racing game, of course, but it is still playable, especially when you’re just looking to get in a race when you’re away from your main rig.
I’ll be testing the game across multiple graphics cards and handhelds when it comes out in May, so at least we don’t have to wait long to see how well it’ll actually perform.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
