Annoying slow down/speed up on Xbox One X

I just started playing Forza Horizon 4 today, but I’m experiencing an extremely annoying issue. The game randomly - but rather often, as in several times a minute - go into a slow down for a second or two, only to speed up immediately after, as if to catch up on ‘lost time’. This makes handling the cars extremely difficult, especially when the game speeds up. I’m running the game on an Xbox One X with the graphics settings set to Quality, so my suspicion is that it’s the game’s attempt at keeping up the frame rate somehow. I did try to set the graphics settings to Performance, but only had a few minutes to test that this evening. The issue didn’t appear during those few minutes, but that’s not to say it will never happen. I’ll have to play more to be certain.

However, the Performance mode looks significantly worse than the beautiful Quality setting. I really wanted to play Horizon 4 because of how beautiful it is, but with Performance setting enabled, it really is like playing an Xbox 360 game or something, at least when you’ve just been playing on Quality. On the other hand, the game is near unplayable with this slow down/speed up that I’m experiencing in Quality mode. Is there anything I can do to get around this? Is it something that is to be expected on Xbox One X? If so, I find that extremely disappointing, because it feels like I’m stuck between “beautiful game with terrible gameplay/racing experience” or “good gameplay/racing experience with terrible graphics”. I really don’t want to make that choice.

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Try going into the menu and choosing Horizon Solo. I’ve confirmed on my console that Horizon Life causes bad stuttering and hitching. I’m willing to bet this will fix your issue. The downside being we miss out on a huge part of the experience. The more people that complain the more we have a chance of it being fixed, so please report back.

I actually had someone else suggest that to me too. I did lose connection at one point during my play time tonight, so it could be that the issue is caused by the game trying to sync with the server, but having issues with the connection. I’ll try to switch to Solo mode on my next session, possibly even disconnect my Xbox’ internet connection, to see if that makes any change. Thanks for your input.

I’m willing to bet just switching to Solo fixes it. If so, please submit a ticket to support. It’s a huge annoyance to me and I don’t want the issue ignored by PG. That’s not to say it is, but more voices always help.

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It indeed seem to be down to some problem with internet connection/server issues or whatever, because the issue didn’t occur when I played tonight in Solo mode, even if I played with Quality settings for almost two hours. Thanks for your help, deathrattlehead. I’ll post a support ticket.

EDIT: How do I actually post a support ticket? :stuck_out_tongue:

Glad to see another case where playing Horizon Solo fixed the issue. This clearly shows that Horizon Life is impacting game performance and something needs to be done.

Submit a ticket here:

https://support.forzamotorsport.net/

Be sure and note that Horizon Solo works flawlessly whereas Horizon Life causes stutter and hitching. Glad you’re able to enjoy some of the game without issue now.

Got this a lot yesterday, OK I downloaded a game in the background - but it still persisted when that was done.

I will try to play more solo when I just want to do races and at least I can stop regretting not getting an X since this seems to be a network problem only, not hardware.

Had similar glitches in FH3 btw, but then it was just skipping a lot of frames - the slowdown/speedup will make you compensate a lot with the controller before you realize where you are actually heading.

You can check your internet cables, I had a huge slowdown due to using old CAT 5 cables, I changed them to CAT 6 and the problem was gone.

I’m glad I wan’t imagining things, I was doing a Forzathon live event and all the other folks cars would randomly speed up and slow down, like fast-forward/slow-mo on a tape, not like braking and using the accelerator.