This is getting really annoying to the point I don’t want to play the game anymore. Every time I do an update to my computer or its drivers I have to endure an automatic pc optimization when I start Forza Horizon 5 for the very next time. It ruins all my settings. I have a decent computer and it always optimizes everything to Extreme settings. My computer can handle it no problem but I have no reason to be pushing 300+ watts on my gpu and pushing 200 watts on my cpu for hours on end. The settings I run all the time keep the gpu at around 130 and the cpu at around 70. STOP WITH THE AUTO OPTIMIZATIONS. It takes me like an hr to figure out my settings perfectly to get those numbers again. I need to take a photo of my settings next time but honestly they shouldn’t even be optimizing your pc in the first place. I swear if they don’t change this, or at least give us the ability to turn it off, they will not see my money in the future.
If you have a rig that’s able to run the game on extreme settings you probably waved your right to power saving. It takes no more than 5 minutes to optimize/compile the shaders and that’s overestimating it and since you have a really good pc it shouldn’t be such a problem. It’s not really an option to stop them because you’ll just end up getting stutters in your game.
Your graphics settings shouldn’t be affected because you updated your drivers. That’s just not how it works. If your game gets an update however, there is a chance that your graphics settings could reset but that’s never happened to me. And if you’re easily comfortable with running Extreme settings , it just takes a button to set up the “extreme preset” and just run the game.
Also if you run some specific tunning settings in your GPU software and they reset upon updating your driver ( if that’s what you’re ranting about ) , that’s not the game’s fault, it’s the tunning software. And it has nothing to do with the game optimizing shaders.
“optimizing for your computer” is code for precompiling shaders. Trust me you want the game to do this. It fixes an inherent bug with a lot of game engines that causes massive stuttering.
It’s way, way, WAY better than the alternative. And yes, it needs to be done every time the game or your divers are updated.
You don’t really want to run the game below Ultra/Extreme settings anyway unless you absolutely have to because the visual fidelity drops quite dramatically in places below those settings.
With geometry and textures set to High, the 3D bushes in the jungle are not reduced in LoD one or two steps, but completely replaced with the 2D low-res imposter billboards intended to be seen from a hundred feet away, and up close those look like radioactive dog sick. Why? Because storing a lower res version of the texture atlas(es) for the 3D bushes wasn’t something PG cared for.
The game wasn’t designed to be run at lower settings. While it can be tamed down, nothing has really been optimized to look as good as it can at Low/Medium/High.
Dude. It takes like 30 seconds
takes like 30 minutes lol
You’ve got slow PC then. Still using HDD?
I have the game on an HDD on an almost 10-year-old PC and it still only takes less than a minute.
For me it takes a lot longer if I do a driver update. With a game update it uses things from previous runs and is done in a few seconds. If I update my gpu driver it does everything from the ground up, which takes several minutes.
So with a 10-year old PC you probably don’t get many driver updates. 
I still get frequent graphics driver updates, when I bother to download them. Even after those I don’t remember the shaders taking any longer to recompile.
Decided to give it a go and updated my graphics drivers. 3 mins 3 secs from pressing play in Steam to getting to drive a car. The optimization alone took 1 min 29 secs. Game is on SSD.
I have 2 SSDs in RAID 0 and it just took 6 minutes 26 seconds