Forza Horizon 5 ships on PC, Xbox Series X and Series S with hardware-accelerated ray tracing support to embellish vehicle reflections – but only in Forza Vista and garage modes. This is something of a shame, especially when photo mode in particular stands to benefit immensely. However, on the DF Supporter Program, one of our backers – Frosticles – produced an RT mod for the PC version (with an assist from Rotab for the Windows Store version), allowing for reflections to run in all modes of the game. So, how beneficial is it and what is the performance cost? Could it be enabled in future on Xbox Series X?
To begin with, let’s clarify how standard reflections work in Forza Horizon 5, because it’s fair to say that even without RT, they look great. If you can imagine six invisible cameras attached to the player vehicle, capturing imagery and mapping it onto a sphere, you get some idea of how the reflections are generated. Effectively, you’re looking at cube-map reflections generated continuously in real-time. These reflections are not perspective-correct, but it’s close enough and works well enough.
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