Forza Motorsport, Xbox Studios’s cinematic 2023 live-service racing sim, is getting a nice visual upgrade in an upcoming update (titled Update 15) shortly after the first anniversary of its release. On December 9, Forza Motorsport will get Ray-Traced Global Illumination (RTGI), making the racing game and all its shiny cars look more realistic. RTGI will be available for all PC versions of Forza Motorsport as of December 9—as long as the game is up-to-date that is—although it will need to be manually enabled in the game’s graphics settings. After being enabled, RTGI will apply to both gameplay rendering and in-game cinematics, as well as the built-in photo mode.
While Forza Motorsport’s minimum recommended GPU specification is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, you will need at least an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series or AMD RX 6000-series graphics card to take advantage of RTGI, with the game’s developer, Turn 10, recommending an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or better for high graphics and RTGI settings. For the uninitiated, RTGI helps increase realism by simulating how light interacts with surfaces and materials, more accurately rendering indirect lighting and shadows in-game. In NVIDIA’s blog post announcing the updated visuals for Forza Motorsport, it recommends using the RTGI in conjunction with DLSS Super Resolution or DLAA to get the highest frame rates. Forza Motorsport is available for PC on Steam (currently 50% off), the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass