Forza Motorsport's 'ideal' system requirements demand an RTX 4080 and an NvME SSD

Back in January, Turn 10 presented us with the traditional listing of the Granular Technical Advancements™ coming in Forza Motorsport. It was an impressive rundown of things like "a fully procedural cloud system," car paint "sourced using a spectrophotometer" which frankly sounds like a gizmo that gets wheeled out during one of those silly ghost-hunting shows, and the pièce de résistance, "hardware accelerated convolution reverb [that] accurately reproduces how sounds in Forza interact within an acoustic space."

(All kidding aside, "convolution reverb" is actually a real thing, which I know because Tyler looked it up.)

What Turn 10 did not say at that time was what sort of hardware you'd need to actually take advantage of all these modern new wonders, but today that oversight has been rectified. The studio has revealed the full PC system requirements for Forza Motorsport, along with various other bits and bobs that players have to look forward to.

It's probably not surprising that the hardware requirements for the new Forza are pretty steep. The minimum specification is relatively midrange, although the storage requirement—130GB of SSD space—is an eye-popper. But assuming you don't want to play a Forza game at the minimum settings (and I'm pretty sure you don't), you're going to need some heavier hardware, because the specs ramp up pretty quickly.

Here's the full breakdown:

Minimum (low settings):

• CPU: Intel i5-8400 2.8GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2Ghz
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 (6GB) or AMD RX 5500 XT (4GB)
• RAM: 8GB
• Storage: 130GB SSD

Recommended (high settings):

• CPU: Intel i5-11600k or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti (8GB) or AMD RX 6800 XT (8GB)
• RAM: 16GB
• Storage: 130GB SSD

Ideal (ultra settings):

• CPU: Intel i7-11700k or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 4080 (16GB) or AMD RX 7900XT (16GB)
• RAM: 16GB
• Storage: 130GB NvME SSD

Forza Motorsport is set to go live on Steam on October 10, but in what's become something of a new tradition, anyone who springs for the Forza Motorsport premium edition—which includes the base game, the Race Day Car Pack, the Car Pass, VIP Membership (a separate package of rewards and boosts including a permanent 2x credits boost), and the Welcome Pack—or the Premium Add-Ons Bundle can start playing five days early, on October 5.