Forza Horizon 6 First Look: DLSS 4.5 and Japan Setting Shine
Playground Games’ upcoming Forza Horizon 6 takes the acclaimed open-world racing series to Japan for the first time, marking a significant technical leap forward. According to early preview reports, the game is the first in the series to feature NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 technology alongside a full suite of real-time ray tracing effects. The Japan-based map blends urban Tokyo streets with Mount Fuji snow tracks, coastal Kansai highways, mountain passes, and rural roads. Notably, the developers have faithfully recreated the iconic Akina mountain pass from Initial D. With over 550 licensed vehicles and a dynamic weather system that shifts between fog, rain, and clear skies, Forza Horizon 6 is positioning itself as the most technically ambitious entry in the franchise to date.
Forza Horizon 6 is the first open-world racing game to launch with NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, the latest iteration of the AI-powered upscaling technology. DLSS 4.5 introduces a 6x multi-frame generation capability, meaning the GPU renders one native frame while AI generates five additional frames. This is a significant upgrade over DLSS 4, which only supported 4x frame generation. The technology uses a second-generation Transformer model to fill in pixel details, correct edge aliasing, and calibrate lighting, ensuring that even during high-speed drifting with multiple cars on screen, textures and vehicle details remain sharp. This effectively eliminates the blurring and artifacts commonly associated with traditional upscaling methods.
Unlike previous entries that relied on lighter ray tracing implementations, Forza Horizon 6 features both ray-traced reflections and ray-traced global illumination. Ray tracing covers the full vehicle body including windows, wheels, and paintwork, with accurate reflections of clouds, buildings, and vegetation in sunny conditions. Night city tracks showcase neon and street lights reflecting off metallic paint and wet roads. The global illumination system handles indirect lighting, creating natural soft shadows under tree cover and even light distribution on overcast days. The dynamic weather system changes lighting logic for each condition — sunny, rainy, foggy, dusk, and midnight — making every race visually distinct.
According to tests conducted on three RTX 50 series GPUs, DLSS 4.5 delivers substantial performance gains across all tiers. On the RTX 5080, native 4K with ultra settings and ray tracing runs at approximately 71fps, while enabling DLSS 4.5 6x frame generation pushes that to nearly 300fps — a 315 percent increase. The RTX 5070 went from 49fps native 4K to 199fps with DLSS 4.5 6x enabled. The RTX 5060, an entry-level card, managed only 41fps at 2K native but reached over 170fps with DLSS 4.5 6x. At 1080p, the RTX 5060 hit 251fps with the technology enabled. These results suggest DLSS 4.5 significantly lowers the hardware barrier for high-fidelity ray-traced racing. This is definitely one to watch for racing fans and tech enthusiasts alike.
