One thing forza can definately improve on in the next game in terms of graphics or visual effects are the crowd. Most of them are just 2d cut outs with no animation. You don’t realy notice it when your driving but when you stop and look around, it look kind of funky.
Here are some photos:
Is it normal for drivers to stop mid race so they can look at the crowd? Unbelievable, after all these years it turns out I’ve being playing the game all wrong 
Seriously though please consider the deminishing returns some of these suggestions would result in. T10 have a mere 24 months to create the game and just how much would an animated crowd improve the game? if the racing is immersive you could loose 50% of trackside detail and not even notice it’s gone.
I think it’s a given that the spectators will be 3D again in Forza 6 - like they already were in Forza 3 and 4. Their disappearance from Forza 5 was too little experience with the hardware and the need to get stable 60 fps by a fixed (early) date more than anything else.
Some years ago i would have agreed. But the reality is that you can achieve a more realistic look if you use bitmaps/billboards in “certain” areas. For example, in Laguna Seca you have just very sporadic trees next to the street. If you pass the tree you see it very much from every angle, because nothing is next to the tree. It’s important to have real 3D geometry to look realistic at every angle.
The opposite is Nürburgring. There you have only trees next to the street and the trees are very tightly coupled. If you pass the trees you wouldn’t notice the complete 3D geometry, because all trees are very tightly coupled. Using Bitmaps/Billboards for that trees is much better, because you save lots of unnecessary geometry and complex lighting. If you use a Bitmap instead you can draw a photo realistic image of a tree and you can compile a very realist lighting into the Bitmap. Sure, it’s static, but very realistic. If you look at a tree at Nürburgring you notice shading on every leaf. Sure, it’s fake and 2D. But it doesn’t matter, because you see the trees at a very low angle and you pass them with high speed.
But it really depends on the scene. If you jump back to Laguna Seca then you have a very bright scenery with lots of contrast. Because of the contrast trees looks very dark and lots of details like leafs just go under. This is just a trick how the content and lighting work together, because you don’t need perfect shading on every leaf of a tree.
The same applys for the spectators. The most time you won’t notice a 3D model. If you have a very big crowd then it’s important to have a variety of different clothing and that the lighting on the crowd is right. If you model everything with 3D geometry, have lots of different clothing textures and have lighting on them it would waste too much performance. It’s suffice to have some few 3D spectators that moves/jumps within the Bitmap crowd to give it a dynamic look.
Project cars’s saturation levels are good but I think the track with the moono on it is a little in accurate in the scenery.
A quick search on the Internet will bring up a lot of Forza v real life comparisons and they look just as good. There are also Forza v PCars comparisons and there’s little to choose between them. There’s one of a lap of Laguna (can’t link fron the iPhone) worth watching, particularly for those that criticise Forza graphics.
If anything, PCars has matched FM5 graphically but I don’t think it’s made much progress in real terms. We’ll have to wait for 6 but I’d be surprised if anything on a console will match it. For me it’s still the game to beat if you’re a developer looking to move into the motor racing genre.
Watched that Laguna Seca video and I have to say I was very impressed. I never really critisized the game’s graphics at the time and even now I hardly do. There are aspects of the game’s graphics that need to work on, especially lighting and the over saturation after I saw that video but apart from that It was almost perfect. Sure there were little inaccuracies here and there but it was almost there. Even the trees mimiced real life pretty well. Just solve those two main problems and it would make Forza 6 look almost twice as good. And as for Project Cars and Forza’s graphics, I would just, only just, go for Forza.
PCARS on X1 is nowhere close to FM5, graphically. I was taken aback by how bland and detail-sparse the tracks looked compared to their FM5 counterparts.
Give the devs some time to better find their way around the hardware. FM2 was nowhere as impressive as FM4 is, graphically speaking on previous gen.
DX12 is incoming. FM6 is going to look a lot better than FM5 in almost every regard. Around FM7 is when we’ll be seeing some serious eye candy though.
Tire smoke could use an improvement. The lighting affects could be improved, but none of this really matters when you’re racing. High frame rates and draw distance are important to game play. Anything else added visually is just superficial.
Graphics are probably the last thing that I think T10 should worry about.
Most of the things that people want in the new game, I personally think are a bit silly and will have little to no effect on whether the game is good or not, or contribute to long term playability.
I would outline exactly what I think should be added or returned, but then this would just be another wishlist post and one of the main things I believe to be vital to long term playability (user created custom public lobbies and the ability to search for these lobbies) I don’t expect to see return anyway, unless microsoft decides to allow users to pay a fee for their own lobby (I would pay for my own lobby if I could, for the record).
Forza 5 looks great, but it will be nice if graphically Forza 6 could match the look of Driveclub and Project Cars.
Only valid comparison is to pCars as this is a sim-racer like Forza series. Whilst DC looks good in places, and certainly looks very good when the weather kicks in, it is after all a 30fps racer.
Running at 60fps developers are severely limited to what can they can achieve when compared to a 30fps racer. Just ask the pCars developers, with their 30-60fps variation during gameplay, which is dependent on weather, the track in use and the number of AI cars during a race. T10 will not compromise their fps for any feature, so expect a locked 60fps, and whatever advancement their engine has made will be clear to see at this years E3.
I think that Forza 5 does match Project cars on the Xbox one, if anything in my opinion it beats it. Drive Club is a completely different kettle of fish. That’s on PS4 and we all hate to say it but know that PS4 is slightly better in terms of graphics than the Xbox one, therefore making forza 6 (an xbox one title) hard to keep up with Driveclub (a PS4 title) in terms of graphics. However know that Driveclub is aging I think that Forza 6 will surpass it. Though if, or more probably when Driveclub 2 comes out we may have this conversation again in the future. Who knows, maybe the Windows 10 treatment may make the Xbox one on Par with PS4, also the DX12 engine that forza will be using may offer up some improvement, we just can’t tell for sure, but what we do know is there will be an improvement nether the less.
DriveClub runs at 1080p/30FPS. You can’t compare it to Forza 5/6 (60FPS), but only Forza Horizon 2. And even this is a hard comparison, because Horizon 2 is an open world game and provides awesome environments (in my opinion better than DriveClub). DriveClub has gotten it’s attention, because of the weather patch. The weather patch added some very very stunning rain effects, not seen before in a game. But it’s also hiding some other things from the user like bad textures. I also think that the color plate on sunny races looks very cartoonish like <Forza 5 .
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We are not comparing like for like. DC is a 30fps racing game, leaning more towards the sim-arcade model, so really should only be compared to FH2. Having played both DC and FH2, FH2 hands down has a much better physics/handling model, all in an open world design. DC certainly has it’s fans, and it does have what folks consider best in class weather effects. However, it and FH2 cannot be compared to a driving-sim such as Forza or GT series. The physics/tire modeling are in a different league including the frame-rate. Only reference is pCars, and unfortunately for pCars on both PS4/XB1 the frame-rate, especially when the weather kicks in really takes a dive into the mid 30. So as far as console version goes, the frame-rate lurches between 30-60 coupled with screen tear depending on the weather and number of AI cars in play. I’m sorry but for a sim racer, it is of paramount important to have a near-locked 60fps refresh. Forza 5 successfully achieves this, as even the might GT5/6 suffered from terrible frame-rate drop under certain weather conditions. Whilst pCars can be commended for attempting to portray real-life Motorsport, it fails fundamentally on a technical level.
Whilst it can be said owner of the PC version of pCars can get past the frame-rate issues, please keep in mind you needs a fairly power CPU/GPU combination to lock it to 60fps. With my own rig, using a Nvidia GTX760 in SLI, I actually cannot play it , as the frame-rate at 1080p languishes in the low teens. Just to give you a point of reference., although Assetto Corsa does not have any weather effects I can achieve a fairly consistent 60fps on my triple monitor display(6030x1080). And as far as I’m concerned also has much better physics and handling model compared to pCars. Fortunately, AC has been announced to be released on PS4/XB1 late 2016.
Furthermore, Forza 6 is likely not a DX12 title, as DX12 has not even launched yet, and development on Forza 6 would have started just before the launch of F5. The best we can hope is a patch to convert it to from DX11.x to DX12, which may or may not provide some additional visual treats. A full-blown DX12 based gfx engine for Forza series can be expected in 2017.
I don’t know where you’re getting your information or who suggested T10 wouldn’t have DX12 until 2017. W10/DX12 is due summer. We don’t have a date for the XB update to W10 but it’s a cert that FM6 will be DX12 and it’s a good bet that Forzatech is a new DX12 engine. What we don’t know is whether the performance improvements will be large enough to make a real difference.
Perhaps I did not make myself clear. Once the finished DX12 is in developers hands, then they can - depending on their resources and budget - decide to re-engineer their graphics engines from scratch to leverage to performance improvement that DX12 has to offer. Since Dx12 is not finished yet, and won’t be until Windows 10 launches(staggered launch from 29th July), it will take some developers at least until the next wave of titles for us gamers to see the results.
Granted 1st party developers will have had access much earlier to DX12 then anyone else and I’m aware Phil Spencer said the 1st DX12 titles should land this fall. But in general we are not going to see the full benefits until 2016-2017.
I did not mean to suggest T10 wouldn’t have access until 2017, if anything I am also of the opinion that they will be the first to showcase some of the DX12 benefits in combination with the XB1 unique hardware, but we have no confirmation, only best guesses at to what extend T10 have implemented DX12 into their development pipeline.
T10 have had access to DX12 prior to FM5, however the API wasnt finalised. As such AMD recently came out and said in not so few words that the xbox supports DX12.0, but not DX12.1
Nvidia currently has the only DX12.1 cards available. 750Ti - 900 series.
How much this actually makes a difference is to be determined.
T10 back at launch implemented a feature called draw bundles and a couple of other specific features that traditionally were related to console development. It was these features that actually being ported to DX12. I believe XB1 uses a vanila version of DX11.x, However, since launch MS have done a ton of work to the provide additional tools/work-around, even including some low level stuff, but that does not mean the developers jump straight to that environment. There is time constraints/budget/skill not to mention learning/re-writing code etc. for developers to consider, so for the vast majority it was always going to be DX11, with all its inherent draw-backs. Once DX12 takes over, things will be a lot easier to leverage on the both XB1/PC, not to mention the ease of cross-development/porting.
