Yesterday I tried Forza Horizon 6 for the first time as I finally got my hands on a Game Pass subscription that Microsoft long denied me due to its convoluted and janky account system. And while the gameplay is fun and quite close to what I already experienced in Horizon 5, the performance genuinely surprised me, especially considering how good the game looks.
When I fired the game up, it automatically set itself at the “Extreme” preset. “Sure,” I said, “why not? It never hurts to see whether your rig can handle the heat.” After all, I do have quite a beefy graphics card: the RX 9070 XT, but it’s nevertheless far removed from Nvidia’s top offerings in both raw rasterization and, particularly, when it comes to ray tracing.
But to my genuine shock, Forza Horizon 6 locked in on 60 fps and stayed there no matter where I drove my car. At 4K native resolution, with FSR only enabled for anti-aliasing, the game runs perfectly while maintaining a dose of graphical fidelity that I haven’t seen in a long, long time. It’s a smooth, responsive experience that feels very satisfying even on my derelict 60Hz TV.
Even with V-Sync enabled—and I do dread this setting a lot because of its high input delay—Forza Horizon 6 remains snappy and without lag, allowing for some of the most fun racing I’ve played in quite a long time.
And that got me thinking: If a car racing game prioritizes looks over most things, how is it that we get so many games where we move a lot more slowly through places that look significantly worse and, somehow, also perform abysmally? In Forza, you blaze through detailed and high-fidelity locations, go through water, snow, and dense forests, and never do you experience any noticeable dip in fps.
However, in mainstream games, and indeed those made in Unreal Engine 5, you could move at a slug’s pace and render little of anything but still struggle to put out 60 fps on competent hardware. The lighting might look nicer, and the reflections could be marginally better, but you nevertheless get constant stutters, lag, or even crashes.
None of that exists in Forza Horizon 6, at least not in my case. I cannot fathom how good the game looks in certain locations, and when I gaze at the top-right corner to see number 60 not even flinching, I get amazed each time.
Unreal Engine games, of which there are many, continue to become more and more present on the market, with studios seemingly obsessed with integrating Epic Games’ solution into their pipelines. Forza Horizon 6 runs on proprietary architecture, and the devs ensured every nook and cranny of their own software works as intended, never relying on pre-made fixes to inherent problems of the engine.
A game that recently also stunned everyone with its performance is Crimson Desert, and it, too, runs on a proprietary, in-house engine.
On the other hand, games like The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, STALKER 2, Oblivion Remaster, and others suffer catastrophic performance issues, and having played most of the main ones, I’m starting to think it’s not a budgetary or a management problem. Fine, I agree the top brass in mainstream publishers probably doesn’t care much about performance and polishing, but I believe it’s high time we accepted that it could be the engine at fault.
With games built on in-house engines now releasing back-to-back and stunning everyone with their performance and looks, I believe the sentiment opposed to Unreal Engine 5 is only going to grow. We see now that games in 2026 can look good and work well, as well as that Unreal Engine has some inherent flaws that likely won’t be fixed any time soon.
I even fired up Arkham City recently, built on Unreal Engine 4, and it still stutters and lags on hardware 15 years ahead of the curve. Something is wrong in the back end, and I cannot say so many studios adopting what appears to be a flawed engine is going to do the industry any good.
But alas. I congratulate Playground Games at achieving and proving what sometimes seems impossible to get, and I hope more studios, especially those relentlessly chasing after Epic Games’ engine, start reconsidering.
