Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today I have a big GPU benchmark for you we'll be looking at the new racing title Forza horizon 4 which will be available worldwide tomorrow on October 2nd now to work out what kind of GPU you'll need in order to enjoy this game and all of its glory using ultra quality settings I have tested 50 graphics cards I think it was actually 51 but I sort of lost count there because there was a couple of cards that didn't work that I normally test with but anyway it's a lot of graphics cards just quickly for those of you unaware Forza horizon 4 is an open-world racing video game developed by playground games and published by Microsoft Studios the game is set in a fictionalized representation of the United Kingdom and as the name suggested is the fourth Forza horizon title but it's also the 11th installment in the Forza series two years ago I did skip over testing Forza horizon 3 due to the terrible performance on PC pretty much came out like a hot mess and because of that it wasn't in a suitable condition for testing the situation with Forza horizon 4 couldn't be more different the game is extremely well optimised especially on modern hardware and to say that it's visually breathtaking would be somewhat of an understatement anyway I'm not here to review the game but I will say that it does seem to be of exceptionally higher quality and the PC version runs like a dream for testing I'm using the built-in benchmark normally I do avoid canned benchmarks but the version provided here is very good and does a great job of representing actual gameplay it's also highly accurate and because of its Kander nature is highly repeatable for testing I'm using the ultra quality preset at 1080p 1440p and 4k then as a bonus i've retested some of the current and previous generation B range GPUs along with some much older models with the medium quality preset at 1080p later this week Tim will be putting together a detailed Forza horizon for optimisation guide so that'll be worth keeping an eye out for if you want to learn how to fine tune your PC as usual our Corsair GPU test rig built inside the crystal 570 X has been used and it comprises of a core i7 8700 K clocked at five to go two gigabytes of ddr4 3,400 Vengeance memory for the radeon gpus I'm using the adrenaline dition 18.9 point 3 and for the GeForce GPUs driver version for 11.7 T so let's take a close look at the previous generation AMD and NVIDIA GPUs things look pretty normal here the GTX 980 looks a little lackluster getting beaten by pretty much all the mid-range AMD offering such as the r9 nano and r9 390 the fury X came in just behind the gtx 980ti well the r9 380 just beat the gtx 960 for 60fps on average or require a gtx 980 or better but for a minimum of 60 FPS you'll still require these fury acts or gtx 980ti so that is a pretty tall order at 1080p as we move to 1440p I've now dropped the GTX 950 and r7 370 as they were simply too slow for testing at this resolution as you can see the gtx 960 and r9 380 are borderline playable depending on your standards I suppose in my opinion anything slower than the GTX 970 really is struggling here and short of the very fastest previous generation GPUs you will notice regular slowdowns of frame dips as you might have expected 4k performance at least with the ultra quality settings is off the table even for the gtx 980ti and fury x overall not great performance from these older generations so how does Forza horizon 4 perform on more modern hardware well let's move on to find out for our current generation GPU tests we're just going to add in the new geforce 20 series card since there are only two models so far for 60 FPS on average actually well over 60 FPS gamers will require a gtx 1066 gigabyte or rx 580 both did deliver exceptional performance at 1080p keeping frame rates above 60 FPS at all times something quite interesting worth noting here is that the RX 562 year buy it was much slower than the 4 gigabyte model basically delivering rx 550 light performance the 2 gigabyte gtx 1050 was also quite a bit slower than the 3 gigabyte model I haven't been able to properly confirm VRAM usage as overlays like rivatuner don't to be working and actually having them open will just crash the game on startup so that's an issue that we're currently looking into then at the bottom of the graph we find the GT 10:30 in both the gddr5 and ddr4 variants and both suck more than usual in this title has to be said something else you've no doubt noticed is how well the AMD GPU is performing this title Vegas 64 liquid for example is still matching the r-tx 2080 making it noticeably fast in the gtx 980ti vega 56 also crushed the GTX 1080 that wasn't much slower on the GTX 10 a key ti we see this across the board as another example the RX 570 smashed the three gigabyte GTX 1060 offering a massive 21% more performance moving a 1440p I've again dropped the entry level model such as the GT 1030 and rx 550 as they simply weren't fast enough to deliver anywhere near playable performance at this resolution again we see graphics cards with only two gigabytes of vram are really struggling here for an 60fps on average the GTX 1066 gigabyte or rx 580 will again be required while the gtx 1070 1070 TI 1080 or vega 56 will be required in order to keep frame rates above 60 FPS at all times again we see the radeon GPU is really schooling the GeForce competition especially vega 56 given it makes sense in terms of price versus performance vega 64 liquid looks impressive but truth be told given the price that should always match the gtx 280 TI interestingly the 2080 TI was just 12% faster than the standard 2080 and less than 20% faster than vega 64 liquid and the GTX 10 80 TI so a pretty weak showing here from the new RT X graphics cards again in terms of price versus performance okay so now at the 4k resolution and I was quite stunned to find the gtx 1070 delivering over 50 FPS on average with a one percenter low of 46 FPS again remember this game looks absolutely incredible and this is at the 4k resolution AMD's Vega GPUs do fall away a little at the 4k resolution but even so Vega 56 matching the GTX 1080 an exceptional result so yes still very impressive for the red team Vega 64 liquid was able to push over 60 FPS at all times and we saw the same from the GTX 1080 TI r-tx 2080 and of course the RT x 28 e TI as usual the RT x 28 e TI was incredible at 4k pushing up to 100 FPS on average still that meant it was just 20% fast in the gtx 980ti so while 100 FPS on average is certainly very impressive it doesn't come close to justifying the price premium now comparing all the data shown so far at the 1080p resolution we get this jumbled mess but there are some interesting comparisons to be made here for example we see just how much more optimized this title is for modern GPUs the GTX 1060 rx 580 for example can be seen easily beating the gtx 980ti a GPU that's typically less than 10% slower than the gtx 1070 but here it was 26% slower we see a similar thing at 1440p the gtx 980ti in fury x were good for just over 60 FPS on average while the gtx 1066 gear by average 62 fps and the RX 580 69 FPS typically we see in other titles that they're both around 20% slower than the gtx 980ti finally at 4k again we say that you will require a modern high end GPU such as vega 64 or the gtx 980ti of course the most ideal solution here would be the r-tx 20 80 TI as that will deliver by far the best results but that over 70% more expensive it does only deliver 20% more performance than the GTX 280 I for example then to finish off the benchmarking I've tested on I study GPUs using the medium quality preset with MSA a disabled in favor of FXAA this wasn't a quick exercise at all mind you are you looking at around 8 hours of work here just to create this graph the game has to be completely reset when changing equality presets and almost every time it crashes on the reset but I'll touch more on this in a moment depending on the GPU you're looking at anywhere from a 20 to 40 percent performance uplift when downgrading from the ultra to medium quality preset the RX 570 for examples or a 20% in performance while the GTX 1050 saw a 30% boost and then the rx 550 a 40% boost the medium quality preset allowed the gtx 960 and r9 380 to average around 60fps and it also enabled playable performance for most of the older mid-range GPUs finally if the GTX 780 and 780 Ti for whatever reason locked up when loading the benchmark I couldn't play the game at all with these graphics cards not sure if that was just an issue with my particular cards or a driver issue or something with the game I tried many workarounds and all of them failed so for now I can't test these GPUs well I hope that helps those of you wondering how well Forza horizon 4 will run on your PC frankly I am super impressed with how well optimised this title is particularly for modern hardware the game looks absolutely incredible so that being the case it still runs very well on older GPUs but for the modern stuff the level of optimization really is incredible I honestly never thought we'd see a game that looks this good but is comfortably playable at 4k using a gtx 1070 and I sure as hell never thought we'd say over 60fps using Vega 56 in fact for me Vega 56 really was the star of the show offering GT X 1080 light performance or that was at 4k it was actually better than a GTX 1080 at 1440p and 1080p so yeah really amazing stuff there from the Vega graphics card and right now you are paying a little bit less for Vega 56 opposed to the GTX 1080 so at least in this title it is better in terms of price versus performance if only performance looked like this in all games then it really would be a much different story for AMD's Vega range of course AMD also dominated the lower end battles as well with the RX 580 and 570 completely cleaning up here it's very interesting that one of the best-looking most optimized titles we've pretty much ever seen shows off AMD's Radeon GPUs in such a positive light that said while the game does look amazing and plays very well it's not exactly bug free at least just yet anyway I did only run into a few in-game crashes when testing so that's not too bad for an initial release the biggest issue though was seen for me when trying to just get into the game for me the game crashed way too often when starting up and tim has also reported the exact same thing when he's been doing his quality setting testing that said a lot of our patreon members who are enjoying Forza horizon 4 aren't reporting the same level of crashing on startup so yeah maybe it's somehow just limited some of myself not sure let us know what you're finding in the comment section below a couple of the patreon noted the occasional crash in-game but you're not the horrendous crashing on startup that we've seen it is known that any hardware changes do cause stability issues when launching the game and often to correct this I've had to reset the entire computer once or twice Tim found the same when changing quality presets as well so maybe it's to do with changing quality settings and hardware not a hundred percent sure on that one this was a huge pain for me though especially when doing the medium quality preset testing as I had to often reset the game many many times and sometimes even the ultimate solution was just to reset the entire PC because it would just keep crashing no matter how many times I did it so a little bit frustrating but not the end of the world another small issue was that you can't have any performance monitoring software such as rivatuner open having that software open will just cause the game to completely fail each and every time so at the moment we don't think you can use a reboot you know overlays but if you've managed to get some sort of statistic overlay working again please let us know about that down in the comment section below that would very much help us out and on that note I would just like to add that we never use MSI Afterburner or rivatuner for the actual benchmarking it's just to show you guys when we record footage of how the game behaves so it's a great tool for doing that but typically for benchmarking we use something like okay so some annoying issues still to be addressed but thankfully for the most part once you actually get into the game it does run like a dream so that's great to see of course you will still have to contend with the disgustingly poor Windows Store if someone knows how to backup Windows Store games please let me know because that would be very valuable to us as far as Tim and myself know it can't be done but surely there has to be a way to do it so if someone has worked it out please let us know in the comment section below because having to download all these Windows Store games over again just makes them very hard for testing and that's pretty much why we don't test with Windows Store games because of the backup and because the window store sucks I could certainly rant about how much I hate the window store for another 20 minutes or more but I'll just spare you guys all that noise and just say that the window store in my opinion is trash absolutely rubbish for games there's plenty of better options available such as steam and if it wasn't for the overwhelming demand from our patreon members for us to test Forza horizon 4 I would have just skipped over this tile and avoided the Windows Store pain altogether and on that cheerful note I am gonna end this one Tim we'll have an in-depth look at Forza horizon for quality settings all that stuff on the channel later this week so make sure you stay tuned for that one anyway I am your host Steve thank you very much for watching and I will see you again next time