Forza Horizon 5 minimum spec pins performance on a GTX 970 or better

Screenshot of Forza Horizon 5 showing two cars with smoking tyres
(Image credit: Microsoft)

If you're anything like me, you're trying not to totally lose it while you wait for Forza Horizon 5 to come out. Just over a month now. Anyways, in the meantime, we can at least check out the Forza Horizon 5 recommended specs, which were released today.

Before you even get a chance to run Forza Horizon 5, you'll need to install it. To do so, you'll need at least 110GB of space free on a HDD or, preferably, an SSD.

To get your tyres spinning even a little, you'll want to hit the minimum GPU specification for Forza Horizon 5: an AMD Radeon RX 470 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. These two cards both had immense reach back in their day, which was a good while ago now, so hopefully neither proves too much of a challenge for would-be racers.

The ideal spec isn't all too recent either, demanding either an Radeon RX 590 or a GeForce GTX 1070 or better. That does mean the incredible popular GeForce GTX 1060 doesn't quite make the cut for 'recommended' but it is safely above the minimum spec and shouldn't have any issues playing the game, at least.

To hit the ideal spec you'll need either a Radeon RX 6800 XT or GeForce RTX 3080.

No real surprises there, then—big, powerful GPU is best. That said, there are promising signs for gaming at 1080p with a modicum of performance with either Polaris or Pascal graphics cards in your PC.

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Forza Horizon 5 recommended specifications
Header Cell - Column 0 Minimum specificationRecommended specificationIdeal specification
CPURyzen 3 1200 / Core i5 4460Ryzen 5 1500X / Core i5 8400Ryzen 7 3800XT / Core i7 10700K
GPURX 470 / GTX 970RX 590 / GTX 1070RX 6800 XT / RTX 3080
RAM8GB16GB16GB
HDD110GB110GB110GB SSD
Min OS versionWindows 10 Nov 2019 update (1909)Windows 10 Nov 2019 update (1909)Windows 10 Nov 2019 update (1909)
Race on

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Onto the CPU and you'll want at least an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5 4460, both of which are four-core processors. It's unlikely you'll run into any issue on most newer processors, then, as almost any Ryzen/Core chip released since 2017 will have at least that many cores (if not many more) and plenty faster clock speeds/architectures.

The ideal spec is a little beefier: a four-core, eight-thread Ryzen 5 1500X or a six-core, six-thread Core i5 8400.

And up top, for the ideal specification, two last gen chips from AMD and Intel: the often forgotten Ryzen 7 3800XT and the Core i7 10700K.

But there's more in the latest Forza Horizon 5 blog post to sink your teeth into. Firstly, ultrawide fanatics will be pleased to know the game will let you bask in Mexico's beauty in a 21:9 aspect ratio. And secondly most racing wheels are fair game, too.

And to top it all off, there's the promise of widespread haptic feedback support cross-platform for the Xbox Wireless Controller. Even PC. And even the Steam version of Forza Horizon 5 on PC. Bring on November 9.

Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.

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