Turn 10 Studios have revealed how well Forza Motorsport will perform on the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles.
As reported by GameRant, the Xbox Series X will get the full benefit of 4K, 60 FPS. In the meantime, Xbox Series S will display at 1080p, but still maintain 60 FPS.
Turn 10 had to make a few key decisions before deciding on the Xbox Series S display resolution and framerate. The Xbox Series S does have technology in it that would allow it to upscale a game like Forza Motorsport all the way to 4K or 2K.
In this case, Turn 10 ultimately decided to maintain that 60 FPS framerate across both consoles. The framerate makes a bigger difference in how the game ultimately looks to players than display resolution does. This does also come with the added benefit of ensuring an even field for competitive play in Forza Motorsport.
However, that is not the full story when it comes to performance. Turn 10 also claims that Forza Motorsport will have ray traced global illumination, a major achievement even for a game of this scale.
As you may already know, ray tracing is a technology particularly focused on reproducing the most accurate lighting in computer generated graphics. Local illumination is simply an application of that ray tracing technology to simulate light reflecting directly from light sources. This could be the sun, a street light, a car light, or a combination of all three.
Global illumination takes into account light reflecting from different surfaces and onto each other. In paper the idea is simple to explain, but in application, this is a considerably more difficult task in computer graphics, that we hadn’t seen it yet applied universally in most video games. Not even all the most highly advanced games get to display global illumination yet. However, this is a feature that has been enabled by tech companies like Epic and Nvidia for their products and services. So far, the best way to experience global illumination is to use one of those products on PC. For example, you can see this in action in Portal with RTX.
Turn 10 managing to pull this off on console for Forza Motorsport is a major technical achievement. While the Xbox Series S and Series X certainly have the hardware capable of pulling off ray traced global illumination, it is a considerably complicated task that required the studio to tweak it to get it to work properly. The PlayStation 3’s Cell processor for example, was not capable of doing this. While it theoretically was never full used to its full potential, we could look at late Naughty Dog release The Last Of Us. That game bordered the quality of an early PlayStation 4 game, however, it didn’t quite deliver on the promise of ray traced global illumination.
Think about how it took nearly two decades for this technology to arrive on consoles from theoretically possible to actually applied on a retail game. At this rate, Turn 10’s Forza franchise could outpace Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo, and never look back. At the very least, Polyphony Digital will be put on their toes and actually compete harder.
Forza Motorsport will be releasing in 2023 for PC via Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and Day One on Game Pass.
