Forza Horizon 6 can now run on a native Apple silicon engine, without the hitch every second.
Press Play on Forza Horizon 6 and Highball offers the new engine once. It sets up an environment of its own and clones the game into it, so there's no second download and your D3DMetal environment stays as it was. On a base M4 with 32 GB it holds an even 30 frames a second at 1080p on the Very Low preset with FSR Quality, with no stall from the copy protection. D3DMetal reaches up to 50 with that hitch, so it's a choice between steady and fast. If you say no, the game page offers it again under Game settings.
The first start takes about 10 minutes, most of it the game's Optimizing for your PC screen, and Steam and Xbox ask you to sign in once in the new environment. It needs macOS 27 and has only been measured on that M4, so please tell us how it goes on your Mac. One known flaw: a freeze of a few seconds in all about half a minute into the first drive of a session.
It runs on KosmicKrisp, Mesa's Vulkan driver on Metal 4. Thanks to steamac (fxgl) and the authors of its KosmicKrisp patches, Willie Abrams, Junmin Lee, Brian Misiak and Matthew Periut among them, whose work this builds on.
Also in this version:
- The Engine pickers offer only the newest of each engine to download. Show older engine revisions in an environment's Advanced settings brings back the rest. Thanks to Hayden for pointing it out.