Just a tiny bit of clarification. The crowds are less dense when driving in practice session compared to the actual race session. Just like in real life more people will come to the actual race and skip the practice.

It looks really realistic. But this definitely shows the visual beauty limit of realism. People respond much better to hyperrealism with exaggerated details rather than a true to life look.

What Turn 10 was able to do with the Xbox One hardware was nothing short of amazing. Even with all of the sacrifices, the game still looks superb six years later.

Having reserved my judgment until I actually played the game… I gotta say it’s pretty incredible. I’m having a fantastic time. The tracks are pretty immersive as well.

Great work. I really enjoyed the detailed comparison with Forza 7 as it really showcases what's actually changed generation to generation.

RTAO seems to dramatically improve visuals on the game. Good to see them using it.

I think one this is clear, the age of more and more polygons is officially over. It’s safe to assume the car on the right has significantly more polygons and yet the difference between the two cars to the human eye is not that big. This is now the era of lighting and textures.

I’ve also noticed that ray traced car reflections depend on what paint job you’re using. When my Supra was blue, other cars reflected in its paint realistically. But when I chromed it out, it literally didn’t show other cars reflected at all. Even when I was right next to another vehicle, the only reflection was the cube map reflection of the environment.

TAA makes this game look overly soft, like a very very thin layer of clear mud, its distracting imo.

I'd love to see a comparison between GT7 and Forza now that both are out on their current gen consoles. Similar to how it was done with GT Sport and FM7 a few years back. Would love to see the video in HDR again as usual because that looked incredible

The lack of spectators is really noticeable and in some shots the last Forza 7 looks better.

Performance RT mode in heavy rain looks spectacular

They definitely need to give the option for full RT reflections in the PC version

Maybe I'm just blind, but sometimes I think that the predecessor looks better or that the graphical leap isn't that big

I'm sure it looks a lot better in hdr, but the color grading here is just a tad flat. I find this to look a lot better than FM7. Materials, image stability, features, but the drop in clarity to fix up specular and instability with TAA rather than MSAA is not a strict upgrade. It makes a lot of sense seeing as basically this game's entire graphical goal was to improve materials.

Microsoft needs to care more about HDR implementation. The 2 heaviest hitters for Xbox this year exhibit grey blacks and terrible color gamut and HDR. That's unacceptable.

I agree with Oliver on almost all the improvements in a technical perspective... but in terms of art, colors, contrast - it looks like a significant step back from the prior games. It has that hazy look with elevated blacks. Not a fan of it. To be clear, a lot of times I preffered the visuals of FM 7 in this footage. Maybe because of youtube compression and "watching it, not playing it" plays a role here but either way contrast definitely seems off !

Unpopular opinion: I would take superior baked lighting over dynamic time progression any day. Look at what Mirror's Edge was able to achieve with its lighting model a decade and a half ago. Racing games could look absolutely unreal if that technique was applied to modern games.

Great video and I just want to applaud that Oliver always gives his personal recommendation on which mode to choose, love it!

I don't know .. . . aside from the foliage, I find the older game looking vastly superior... I do not understand why there are so little people thinking the same (if any)

I kinda prefer the 7 looks, despite of less complex geometry and not so advanced lighting. It looks bright, shiny, and lively, and the latest one is just flat and boring to my eye.

New game looks better overall but I prefer some of the cheats being used in FM7 like crowds. I think this game shows some of those tricks had value for the final result to casual observers. At least it's stable 60 fps. A lot of games go crazy w/ trade offs but still have a poor framerate. Great effort!!!

I think while FM is clearly ahead technically, I find FM7 to be LARGELY more aesthetic than FM. From contrast and lighting choices to color palette, I much prefer the visuals of FM7

What was said in the preview: track textures and foliage textures are a lot lower resolution than in Forza 7. In this video, it is again visible and so obvious, but suddenly is not mentioned anymore. The textures look horrible and flat. As also said in this video: texture filtering is reduced in quality over Forza 7. What was mentioned in the preview video, than the anti-aliasing has been changed to TXAA, while it was MSAA in Forza 7, is not mentioned here, but is still visible. Why was this not mentioned in this video??? What I conclude from both videos, is that global illumination is vastly improved, that trees look better (although they still aren't 3D while in the previous video was claimed to be 3D and Turn 10 also claims that they are now 3D), and that RT is being used but at a much lower way than Turn 10 claimed it was in their own videos. So on one hand, they have improved the visuals, while on the other hand they have lowered the visual quality. I'm not impressed by the whole. Remember that this is exclusive for Xbox series X, S and PC. Turn 10 is a first party dev for MS. Forza Horizon 5 is much more impressive than this Forza Motorsport considering it's completely open world. This game was anounced as THE showcase for Xbox series X and S. It is far from it. Turn 10 can do better than this, but were they pushed by MS to release it because it has taken since the anouncement and showcase for Xbox Series X until now, being 4 years ago? If this was really more than 4 years in development, why is it not a graphical showcase as promised? Or could it be that it wasn't actually being developed for more than 4 years as they first developed Forza horizon 5? Something isn't right here. I expect that there will be graphical updates in the future and much more optimisation. This is not worth 80 Euro's in this state. This is not the game that was promised. Just look at the first gameplay anouncement and look how much better it looked then.

I feel we're at the point where developers should just release absolute garbage pre-view builds, as well as graphical options that make the game unplayable. Most conversations around game quality seem to focus on a complete lack of understanding about how real word limitations means you can't max out visuals, include every modern technology, and still have a game run at a reasonable frame rate. People simply see a 60 or even 120 fps experience with full real time path tracing as this completely achievable thing the developer choose not to deliver for some reason. Letting people tank their experience to a unplayable slid-show by including options that hardware simply can't support might be the only way forward, as you see this problem a lot less among PC gamers. Mind you, GT7, which offers extremely limited Ray-tracing and only does so at 30fps didn't see anywhere near the negative response FM7 is getting for having more ray-tracing at a higher frame rate, so maybe the real problem is actually even more simple ...

tbh the tarmac texture and the ground next to the track looks really low res compared to FM7, what is going on there texture wise? its quite blurry

You mention the "crowd is less dense." I'm guessing you took those pictures during a Free Race. The game dynamically changes crowd density depending on the race type. There are fewer people at Practice than the race for instance. If you were racing on Career or a full race, those stands would have been full.

5:20, worth mentioning Gran turismo started every car model from scratch for GT Sport (with future gens in mind) while Forza is still using some car models which are 18 years old! Take a look at the R32 Skyline and its really lacking detail and even the shape is wrong. The new Forza models for this game do look good though, shame they didn't scrap more of these older model for a re-scan.

Is it just me or does Forza 7 look better in the first comparisons? The new Forza looks a bit blurry and washed out, also see the aliasing on the barrier still. This appears closer to something I'd expect from the Series S in terms of clarity and visuals.

There’s a number of times where if you took the labels off, I might mistakenly mark 7 as the new game. 😬 looks great on PC, but not near as good on console as we were led to believe it would be

Hey! Are you guys planning on doing a deep dive on FSR 3 anytime soon?

Its really strange that the cockpit camera has no motion blur enabled. It looks really odd when Switching to it while all other views use a high quality per object motion blur. Any known reasons for that?

That January preview looked seemingly far better than the final product wth

Yea, nice to see it side by side with Forza 7, a game I played the hell out of, got gold on every track. I do plan on the same on this one. It looks good, and I can't wait to get my hands on it..

in real racing the sequence goes as follows. Practice, qualifying, then race. you should get a good bonus for qualifying high. is seems like the top 3 or 4 AI cars really pull away early race. so I can see a lot of players choosing a 6th place, 7, and 8th place starting spot. Qualifying would do the same thing as choosing a start spot. the players skill level should be the main focus.

Wouldnt a 1080p@30fps RT mode on XSS be possible though?

12:07 IQ of FM7 looks about 4x clearer/higher res.

Am I mad, I prefer how 7 looks by a stretch. Possibly the new one looks more realistic, just doesn't have that pop, it's not dazzling to the eye.

I can see the obvious lighting upgrades....but other than that...many of these comparisons could have swapped and you wouldnt even know. Like at 6:16 the changes are just changes...not an upgrade/downgrade. This is not to put a negative spin on the new release, just really a testament to how far they pushed the last Forza visuals on the hardware it used.

Ah, thanks Oliver, I just got my invite to the early access, installing now!

I don't want to start a fanboy war. This is clearly a beautiful looking game. But I feel, at least in this video, it looks a little bit more artificial, and less photorealistic than GT7. I wonder why. Is it the PBR materials? Is it the lighting model? The subtle yellow/orange color grading? A combination of multiple of those aspects? What's going on? I mean, this is probably an artistic choice and that's fine. I'm just interested in the technical reasons. I'd love to see a video of John comparing the different approaches to rendering these cars and tracks in Forza Motorsport and GT7 (since he did the GT7 analysis). But looking at the release schedule ahead, I guess he'll be busy for the next few months. But it's rare to see two industry leading teams at the top of their game taking on the same source material, and come up with different solutions. I mean, between, PS5 and Series X, even the hardware is very similar. I'm sure it'd be interesting to see which decisions these developers made in terms of drawbacks and features they're pushing.

To be honest without title signs I couldn't tell which one is the newer when you show them side by side. 6 years of graphics improvement and the differences are minor.

6:39 that shadow on the bootlid 😳

I could listen to Olie talking about anything even socks that would still be my background voice.

Great Job DF! I wonder if things like FS3 will allow these consoles to fly the way we all thought they would and know they could, GFX have taken so many steps backwards to me recently but it's not the hardware's limits as much as using new technique's , I know there's incentives using knew engines but I want to see some Devs Use Older Tech for crisp high FPS using said generations tricks to get buttery smooth optimized gameplay even if newer tech is not able to be used like RT etc. I never had an Issue with old style reflections, and I appreciate RT in certain games too, balance is needed in the Industry.

I’ll be playing this day one tomorrow thanks to early access and am super hyped for this. But I’m disappointed about no qualifying for AI races, which I could have swore was promised previously, and the lack of RT GI on the PC version. I do like that there is a practice session before each race. Which will help to simulate the race weekend feel.

Do U guys use drivers that are optimised for games? Do you get drivers from nV (or AMD) before release to public?? Grtz

Good stuff. Only thing is the audio was a bit quite/muted making it hard to hear your narration Oliver.

Dynamic 1080p and no rt, i have an s and this just looks a bit too blurry for my console. Based on the trailers i hoped they could at least do rt shadows on the s and a 1440p 60 mode.

There are a few differences for sure but I see much greater leap compared with Lamborghini 64.

About the comparison between FM and GT7... An interesting detail is that it's much easier to calibrate your TV to make FM more visually impactful than GT7 more realistic (if that is what you want). The same logic applies to photography. Photographers seek photos in the "RAW" format, which has minimal post-processing and appears quite washed out. This way, you can edit and achieve the ideal result. However, have you ever tried editing a photo that has already undergone smartphone post-processing? The colors are highly saturated, and the contrast is high. It becomes much more challenging to make the photo more realistic-or ideal for you-in this way. (RAW photos have various advantages besides being less "contrasty." I only addressed this point due to the similarity.) In the case of Forza, I would simply reduce the gamma and shadow detail a bit, and it would be perfect.

I often wasnt sure what was the old forza and what was the new game

Have been looking forward to this

Excellent video. Oliver is the new work horse of the channel. He seems to do most of the videos now. Great addition to DF.

On PC VRR seems to be broken entirely. Run a simple benchmark with 60 vs 60 vsync with and without VRR enabled on your monitor. 60 vsync acts unlocked on my 120Hz LG CX with VRR enabled, where 60 tries to hold 60 but is still all over with frame times. The only 'fix' I've found is to turn off VRR running at 60 (vsync) in game and I get a perfectly flat line for frame times.

Great review Ollie! Can't wait to play

what i dont really like is that wash out look of the game on day time i 100% prefered the saturation and contrast it had on motorsport 7

I feel like FM7 trackside detail almost looks better in a way. It seems like they scaled down the quantity of trackside assets to increase the detail of fewer assets. IMO FM7 looks better in that aspect of the track not seeming so empty.

Those shots in the rain look f'n amazin

a 40fps MODE with the reflections boosted to the same 40fps BE an ideal mode for this game, on both series s and x, or if they can get the 60fps mode to have the reflections be 40fps, sense no frame drops occur they might have some headroom for that.

I would love to see a graphics comparison/technology review for older games that are still being updated. One might bring up World of Warcraft, Even Online, War Thunder, etc. Great to see how these games evolved graphical wise and keep adding newer technologies in them.

Lighting is such a huge step from last gen games

Please make a comparison video for GT7 and Forza Motorsport.

I missed the logos on the side by sides and realized it looks better in 2 out of 10 scenes and just different everywhere else

Current Gen only + Dev time = Not impressive

The GameCube man strikes again! Great video as usual

thank you for all the good work you do - a silly question. why in race my opponents are ghost/transparent. what option did I miss? cheers

The interior mirror affecting the screen space reflections on the wet race track surface is absolutely awful, they need to fix that

Looks amazing, will be playing it on PC and Series X (maybe try it on my steam deck to), thanks as always for the video, looks like another great Forza Motorsport entry, they sure are consistent Turn 10.

Don’t forget y’all. Playground Games is creating FABLE with ForzaTech :)

To be honest,the 2 shots of the mustang,performance image looks better than perf RT image,to me anyway.

4:23 Lower res asphalt textures??? Did Turn10 never heard of anisotropic filtering?!

I hope we'll get RTGI on PC at some point, because the PC version seems quite restricted at the moment

Great video. I think for some reason the game looks way behind GT7 graphically

Content Manager for Assetto Corsa has a module called Extra FX, in which it has the option to replace the usual way the game does reflections on cars (cube maps, updated in real-time. You can set at what frequency) with so-called "local reflections (SSLR)". This also makes other cars show up in reflections on your car. Is it possible Forza isn't using ray tracing at all but instead whatever this Assetto Corsa mod uses? - I ask, because I would think if the rays are being shot around anyway, what's the benefit of making parts of cars reflect with cubemaps instead and only show ray traced reflections where they're "most reflective"? And what does that mean anyway? Do cars with less reflective paint not use ray tracing where shinier cars would? Also, it's weird to me that time of day changes appear scripted and don't follow a linearly moving sun. If shadows are in real-time and the AO is ray traced in real-time, why not have the sun move in real-time and have that determine the level's lighting? What's going on there? Again, Assetto Corsa with Content Manager and SOL has a sun that moves astronomically correctly. To the point that days in winter are shorter than days in summer. I would have thought with Forza specifically built to handle everything in real-time, it would follow that it simulates the sun in real-time too. Otherwise, if we're going to blend from one "state" to the next, why bother rendering AO in real-time? I would love to see a bit of a deeper dive on this.

Out of curiosity, is the Mercedes SL from the start of the video in the comparison between Forza Motorsport 7 and Forza Motorsport the same paint color? Just aking since it talked about the car materials, but the FM7 Mercedes looks like it have a brushed chrome while the FM looks like it have a metallic light brown.

Very curious how close the PC version will come to the original preview footage...

It's looking soft, desaturated and low contrast but maybe it's because of the gamma value bug mentioned in the video. Should be easy to fix with a patch.

I can't wait for John's comparison video, his last one was classic. I look forward to play Forza despite feeling a bit underwhelmed, I expected more from the visuals since this is current gen only. This does not look a generation ahead.

Silverstone was fully scanned for this game. And it shows, apparently the Nuremberg rings Nordshlife long track is getting the same treatment.

Judging by its small incremental upgrades I feel like it could've ran of Xbox One. Compare this 2023 game with 2013 Forza 5, the difference is hard to spot, I'd even say that 5 looks better in some instances

The more I play the more disappointed I get but but with the gameplay rather than the graphics. This is a next gen (current gen) only game but there is clearly something going on with the graphics here. The graphics are not as impressive as GT7 or even Motorsport 7 in some instances and I don't get it. The texture resolution seems much lower on many items, the road and grass looks lower in resolution and is quite noticeable compared to Forza 7 and I don't know why. The team talked about their new 3D foliage but all they are, are 2D boards that stay static as opposed to always facing forward to the player. It took them 6 years to develop so why is a game made from the ground up for the Series consoles not as impressive as something that was developed for last gen consoles? I am way more impressed with what Turn 10 was able to accomplish on the X Box One which was a 1.3 TFLOP machine. The Series X is a 12 TFLOP machine so why it looks like this makes zero sense. The image isn't stable, its blurry and the ray tracing looks messy, noisy and busy. Their new AA solution looks bad, Forza 7 was much sharper and stable. I put over 200 hours in Forza Motorsport 7 and while this new game plays much better, it does not look better. I'm curious if patches can fix this, I'm also curious if we ever hear what happened behind the scenes at Turn 10 because its clear that something went seriously wrong during its development cycle. I can't wait for John's video where he compares Motorsport 8 vs GT 7, its going to be one to remember! P.S. Forgot to mention how washed out it looks. This was clearly not built from the ground up.

I think the TAA Implentation make the 30FPS Cube Maps more jaring because of the temporal noise.

I wouldn't be surprised if they enable more RT options for PC later. Maybe when the new XBox release or so for parity reasons. They probably just want the game to run right now so ppl can play and don't complain about crashes too much.

Looking forward to Forza motorsport vs Gran Turismo PS5 DF video!

Excellent video, Oliver! You have improved a lot since the beginning 💪🏻

Haven't played a Forza in a very long time. How long you think it'll take for them to release new tracks?

I can’t wait to get my hands on this game it’s all I’m going to be playing for awhile !!!!

Is it just me or does it appear that forza 7 looks better than the new one when they had comparisons in the video? 😂

I knew instantly that the final game would look nowhere near as good as the earlier promotional footage when they first started showing it. I’m sad to be proven right.

I hope raytracing is soon standard so they can finally focus on Physics & Sound 💟🌌☮️

Can’t wait to start my PC tomorrow afternoon back from work 😍😍😍

I know the review was focused primarily on visuals, but car handling and physics feel much improved vs a very good FM7.😊

When is the PC tech review?

I still wonder why modern racing games don‘t implement brake light flickering road cars use when hitting the brakes hard. And corner bend lightning exists for decades as well..

Have a Series S with a FHD monitor, performance mode seems about right to me.

what i really want to know is how much has the underlying tech responsible for overall car handling and track physics improved over Forza Motorsport 7? is there a difference in how the driving in Forza Motorsport "Feels" vs the previous games? Do these new tech improvements bring Forza Motorsport closer to being an actual "Racing Simulator" or is it still just an "Arcade Racing Game/Race sim lite"?

12:00 that TAA butchering..... like, sure image stability is better, but it blurs the image so badly I got the idea the game went to 480p

16:49 my goodness that dashboard is cool. What car is that?? I don't recognize the A with the line through it.

An excellent review Oliver! I'm really looking forward to playing it. It's not cool to show promotional images that then don't fully match the actual content, great that you point it out, hopefully maybe on PC they'll end up unlocking that hidden potential.