Those screenshots are pretty damning. Forza 6 already made a lot of quite drastic cuts to quality from Forza 5 and now they’ve gone further backwards. It will be interesting to see comparisons with other tracks to see what else they’ve quietly downgraded.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of last gen where the Forzas graphically all got unequivocally better with each new release.
Not quite true my friend. Between FM3 and 4, there was a graphical downgrade. Do a side by side comparison and tracks in 4 looked washed out while losing a fair amount of trackside detail. The FM4 forums were getting hammered with complaints but in order to achieve the improvements in sound and physics while keeping frames capped, it had to be done. FM4 did have vastly improved car sounds and physics, not to mention more tracks and all the other goodies.
Why are people under the impression that the One-X boasts higher detail levels compared to the base Xbox One models? It is a 4K/HDR console and ALL the additional power that it has is to run games at a LOCKED 60/30fps @4K resolution. Resolution, as you PC buffs especially know, has nothing to do with detail, filtering or anti-aliasing.
All in all, you will see very sharp and crisp textures, coupled with perhaps better FSAA or MSAA. the additional power in all likelihood can be used for faster loading times and multi-tasking. What does this means for games? Little to no stuttering, super-stable frame rates with little texture compression required and faster load times. The One-X is not a PC - a beefed up PC can perform far better than a One-X BUT… drum roll please you will see richer texture detail and filtering ONLY if the game supports it. I bring this up because Forza has to be kept balanced out across all platforms. It seems very unlikely that you’ll be seeing better looking trees, higher trackside detail and car modeling or an unlocked frame rate on the One-X.
Fact: Horizon 3 on X-One X is not 60+ fps even though it is on the PC. FM7 and only one other game are 60 fps and running at (allegedly) native 4K. Most games coming for the X-One X have not been able to hit native 4K at a locked 60 fps. They are more or less capped at 30 fps, and in most cases, checkerboarded 4K. Do you think with all this work cut out, developers will be adding higher detail and filtering, making the base versions look inferior? Seems like a really stupid marketing & business practice, if that ever happens. The games are still developed primarily for the base console and then get the additional textures (resolution upgrade not detail) for 4K.
So please stop creating confusion and false information - the One-X will not magically give you better audio or richer texture detail in first-party X-one exclusives. Although, on the subject of audio, we might expect a more advanced codec owing to the Dolby Atmos and DTS:X support, but then games need to natively support that. So far, none do.
Fairly certain the devs have gone on record to say that there will be higher resolution textures, otherwise known as 4k assets, less pop in, greater draw distances and better particle effects. Though that last one could be wrong.
Digital foundry have conducted a number of analysis videos picking apart the two versions, I recommend having a look at them if people would like to know the differences.
I’m going too fast to notice the grass. They have obviously had to cull some stuff with the extra effects they’ve added. For those asking, the grass and trees look no different on PC maxed out.
Oh no…so not only is it tbe same game as Forza 6 but it doesnt even look as good! Oh dear… RIP Forza Motorsport…its a long wait for Horizon…but itll be worth it.
Worse graphics than Forza 6? Oh dear…thats the only reason I wanted this game. Its bad enough its the same game as Forza 6 but to hear reports it looks worse!? Pre order cancelled.
RIP Forza
The Xbox One has 7-year old hardware in it. As Ialyrn and others have pointed out, many new and CPU intensive features have been added to each game. And that causes details to be sacrificed. T10 has said that every track has a specific budget that it must stay within to maintain 60fps. Looks like the foliage and textures were taking up too much of that budget, so they were cut back.
If graphics are that important to you, that’s the whole reason Microsoft is making the Xbox One X. It will run all tracks and cars at full detail, whereas the older and weaker Xboxes can still play the game, but they will have reduced visual and audio quality.
Disingenuous imo, the console is 4 years old, not 7. (Yes I realise you mean the hardware was not high end even on its debut. But nor was the 360’s hardware ever considered high end.)
Forza 4 came out four years after Forza 2, and each successive iteration had better graphics.
I think your argument is invalid. If Forza 4 tried to push dynamic weather with rain, night and 24 cars on track, I have a feeling that it would have looked around the same as Forza motorsport 3. That’s the reason track side detail has decreased but imo overall graphics has increased. Better AA and reflections. More detail in the cars and more natural lighting.
Xbox 360’s GPU was high end. The console launched November 2005 and at the time it’s GPU was virtually as fast as the best single cards of the era. A few months later from brute force it fell behind inevitably but it was still technically more advanced, because it had a unified architecture and DX10 like hardware features not seen in desktop video cards for nearly another year in the Geforce 8800 series.
We did indeed see a pretty huge improvement from Forza 2 to Forza 4 in graphics though. I would put that down to the simple architecture of the latest consoles. 360 was relatively easy to work with after numerous complex console designs, but you still had plenty of performance you could find as you learnt the tricks of it.
It seems the existing consoles however are so much easier and familiar to get into (PC in a box) that it’s difficult to produce anything extra even when you have had years working on it. You have such good tools to maximise performance that you can do it quickly, and little is left on the table unless you made a real mess.
For 360 it was mostly the PowerPC architecture that held back early games (and it was the first time with multiple cores and parallelization). But yes, the architecture of PS4 and Xbox One is really simple for a PC developer. As such there are no more magical gains, you have to take a little to give a little, it’s more about moving ressources around. As such the new features in Forza 7 come at a price of harsher LOD settings, less track detail, more popups (reduced draw distance) and lower resolution textures. I’d even say the reason we got Dubai is because desert is visually much more forgiving than say the intricate details of a city like London or New York. Let’s just hope that One X will give us a true graphical jump - and that under Phil Spencer Turn 10 has more influence on the design of the next gen Xbox. Xbox One was designed by non-gamers and it shows.
You absolute MADMAN dont you know graphics are everything. It doesn’t matter if the game is good it needs to look good! 4K resolution only!!! This game looks bad so it is automatically bad!
