Forza Horizon 6 is already Steam Deck Verified, which I’m forced to concede makes much of this article surplus to requirements. Yes alright, big green checkmark, you can convey the meaning of “it works” without publishing an entire performance and settings guide, or indeed needing to spell out the words “it” or “works”. But then we’ve known that since March anyway, so I guess we’re both stating the obvious.
Or are we? FH6 may follow Forza Horizon 5 down the smoothly tarmacked road of full Deck compatibility, but it still requires some extensive quality-lowering to escape sluggishness – its brisk pace on desktop PCs being much harder to match on handheld hardware. At the same time, sticking the Very Low preset on and being done with it robs the game of most of its Forza-standard lustre, at least traces of which can be kept without sending framerates off a cliff like a confused satnav.
First thing’s first, though: making space for it. Forza Horizon 6 is the portliest Horizon yet, clocking just over 155GB once installed – enough to make the 64GB Steam Deck’s internal storage a non-starter and swamping most of the 256GB model. Less than ideal for a portable PC, and that’s all before the inevitable plastic toy crossover expansion. The good news, though, is that it also doesn’t appear to have any qualms with running off a microSD card, so if you don’t feel like swapping out the entire SSD, popping in a humble memory card can easily help accommodate FH6’s heaped gigabytes.
There is one last hoop to jump through before playing, in the form of Microsoft’s irritating Xbox account login, but at least this doesn’t need repeating once you’re signed in for the first time. The Xbox service also handles cloud saves, rather than Steam, and in practice this works much the same as Valve’s version – so if you’re playing a Steam copy, your progress (and rapidly swelling collection of bodykitted Japanese sedans) will still carry over between your Deck and your main PC.
Otherwise, it’s business as normal. There’s no need for Proton GE or any other compatibility doctoring, and the default controls handle very nicely indeed. Battery life is down a bit compared to Forza Horizon 5 – that drained a fully-charged LCD Steam Deck in 1h 37, whereas FH6 ran it dry in 1h 23m – but it’s not the thirstiest game to ever grace these thumbsticks. Quick pause/quick resume works too, playing offline is fine despite the Xbox account stuff, and there’s very little in the UI that becomes hard to read when compressed into the portable-sized screen.
The last concern, then, is performance. Horizon 6’s benchmark tool provides us some shorthand: with FSR 3.1 upscaling on Quality mode, it averages 30fps on the Medium preset, 36fps on Low, and 46fps on Very Low. Pelting it around the game for real, however, shows that these numbers are just the means of some fairly up-and-down framerates – again, much more so than on desktop.
Medium, for instance, does stay above 30fps out in the country roads, but pass through Shibuya Crossing in heavy traffic and it falls into the twenties too often to use as-is. Low can dip below 30fps in busy areas too, albeit more momentarily, and can reach as high as 60fps out in the sticks. Very Low is clearly the quickest but also, by four standing quarter-miles, the least pretty. And playing an ugly Forza just seems wrong.
The solution? Combine all three.
Forza Horizon 6: Steam Deck settings guide
In a stroke of luck, many of Horizon 6’s most performance-wilting settings – particularly texture and geometry quality – are the kinds where playing on a smaller, lower-rez display makes their diminished forms harder to spot. Others are sufficient aesthetic upgrades to be worth clutching onto: yes, you could get a few more frames out of totally disabling shadows, but that actually will look crap.
Below are the settings I’ve been using myself, following a testing regimen that largely revolved around driving through Tokyo until the chugging stopped. They’ve been getting me between 30-40fps in the city, usually sticking around 45-50fps elsewhere. You may also need to manually set the display resolution to 1280×800, and to remove the game’s 30fps cap – the latter was defaulted to on my Deck, as was a slightly short 720p rez.
- Motion blur: Short
- Resolution scaling: FSR on Balanced
- Car level of detail: Low
- Environment texture quality: Low
- Environment geometry quality: Very Low
- Car reflection quality: Very Low
- Screen space reflections quality: Off
- Raytraced reflections quality: Off
- Shadow quality: High
- Night shadows: Off
- Screen space GI quality: Medium
- Raytraced GI quality: Off
- Shader quality: Low
- Audio quality: Ultra
- Deformable terrain quality: Medium
- Particle effects quality: Medium
- Volumetric fog quality: Off
- Lens effects: Off
- Motion blur quality: Low
There’s also one other tweak that may be of interest. Out amongst the field and trees, framerates can go considerably higher, but they can also peak and trough quite rapidly: 55fps one moment then 42fps the next then back to 50fps and back down to 44fps and so on. While it technically might leave some frames on the table, I ended up using the Steam Deck’s own Performance settings menu (accessible by pressing the three-dotted button) and limiting the display’s refresh rate to 45Hz, effectively a 45fps cap. Despite the snipped-off highs, this in fact made FH6 look smoother overall, as there wasn’t such noticeable lurching between performance levels. Hah! Let’s see you think of that, checkmark face.
