Forza Motorsport is finally getting Ray-Traced Global Illumination, so prepare your rigs

While Forza Horizon 5 celebrates its latest holiday season with awesome cars and wacky events, Forza Motorsport is far more somber. After delivering game-changing improveme🌠nts over the course of 2024, now’s the time to refresh the graphics, and that means Ray-Traced Global Illumination is finally coming out.

That’s right, the sorely missing high-end RTGI that pre-release Forza Motorsport materials hinted at is finally abou✃t to be released as part of Update꧟ 15 on December 9 alongside a host of other important content, such as the legendary Bathurst track and a celebration of Australian automotive history. RTGI is the transformative bit in my book. Early-game mods were able to massively ramp up Forza Motorsport‘s limited-scale ray-tracing, granted, but that’s a far cry from true RTGI. We’re getting a subtle but meaningful lighting revamp across the entirety of the game, and that includes reflections and beyond. The kicker? Performance will undoubtedly suffer.

Check out RTGI in Forza Motorsport’s Update 15, launching on December 9

Turn 10 has done great things with Forza Motorsport over the past year or so. Between the reintroduction of FOMO content and a substantial expansion of baseline tracks, vehicles, and other tidbits, Forza Motorsport has grown into one of the best racing games on PC and Xbox. Not without its faults, granted, but a solid showing regardless. The biggest remaining disappointment has been that Forza Motorsport simply didn’t look as good as it did in pre-release materials, and that’s because it launched with half-measure ray-tracing.

Update 15 resolves this problem (hopefully) with the release of Ray-Traced Global Illumꦕination, a computation technique that more accurately renders both direct and indirect lightning and properly simulates object occlusion across the entire scene. This sounds minor on paper, but as hopefully show, the effect leads to a subtle but genuinely exciting improvement in visual fidelity both in and out of the vehicles.

RTGI will be added to Forza Motorsport as an entirely new, bespoke toggle. To use it, you’ll need to first set the “Raytracing Quality” option to “Full Reflections + RTGI” and then set “RTGI Quality” to “High.” This will apply the full brunt of RTGI to the literal entirety of the game, from track-side gameplay to the Homespace/Garage.

The problem, as I suggested earlier, is that RTGI is going to further pummel Forza Motorsport‘s already questionable performance. Turn 10 recommends the RTX 3080 as a baseline minimum to make use of RTGI, but you really do want the “Nvidia RTX 4090 for the best experience,” as if that wasn’t obvious enough. This also leads us to the next problem for a part of the player base: Xbox consoles are not getting RTGI in any way, shape, or form.

Just how heavy is RTGI going to be in Forza Motorsport? Or, rather, is using it going to be worth it in a game that already runs more poorly than the open-world Forza Horizon 5 on top of looking substantially worse than it does? One way to find out, and we’ve got a few more days to go before we can test it out. I’m hoping it’ll affect Forza‘s somewhat questionable car paint shader, too, but we’ll see!