This GFN Thursday is burning rubber with the latest Forza Horizon games from Microsoft Studios. Check them out on PC Game Pass. Plus, give the gift of cloud gaming with the latest membership bundle, which includes a free, three-month PC Game Pass subscription with the purchase of a six-month GeForce NOW Ultimate membership. It's all part of an exciting week, with 13 new games joining the GeForce NOW library.

Zoom, Zoom
Jump into the driver's seat in Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5 from Playground Games and Microsoft Studios. Explore the critically acclaimed open-world racing games, featuring dynamic weather and seasons that can make or break even the most seasoned drivers. Race across beautiful, historical Great Britain in Forza Horizon 4. Ride solo or team up online with players from around the globe in a shared, open world. Collect, modify and drive over 450 cars from the Horizon car roster - plus, race, stunt, create and explore to become a Horizon Superstar.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 527.56 WHQL comes with optimization for Portal with RTX, a remaster of the cult classic with enhanced with NVIDIA RTX, which we took for a spin. Besides, the new drivers also add optimization for The Witcher 3 Wildhunt Enhanced Edition, which will debut later this month, and Jurassic World Evolution 2. Among the issues fixed with this release include flickering noticed when looking at the sky in Watch_Dogs 2, on machines powered by RTX 4090; games with DLSS 3 crashing when ending a recording using Shadowplay or OBS with NVENC; display corruption noticed in Minecraft Java Edition, hotplugging between HDMI and DP not working correctly on RTX 4090; and certain issues with Adobe Premiere with H.265 and HEVC content.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 527.56 WHQL

AMD sent ripples in its late-October even launching the Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA2 "Big Navi" graphics cards, when it claimed that the top RX 6000 series parts compete with the very fastest GeForce "Ampere" RTX 30-series graphics cards, marking the company's return to the high-end graphics market. In its announcement press-deck, AMD had shown the $579 RX 6800 beating the RTX 2080 Ti (essentially the RTX 3070), the $649 RX 6800 XT trading blows with the $699 RTX 3080, and the top $999 RX 6900 XT performing in the same league as the $1,499 RTX 3090. Over the weekend, the company released even more benchmarks, with the RX 6000 series GPUs and their competition from NVIDIA being tested by AMD on a platform powered by the Ryzen 9 5900X "Zen 3" 12-core processor.

AMD released its benchmark numbers as interactive bar graphs, on its website. You can select from ten real-world games, two resolutions (1440p and 4K UHD), and even game settings presets, and 3D API for certain tests. Among the games are Battlefield V, Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019), Tom Clancy's The Division 2, Borderlands 3, DOOM Eternal, Forza Horizon 4, Gears 5, Resident Evil 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Wolfenstein Youngblood. In several of these tests, the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT are shown taking the fight to NVIDIA's high-end RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, while the RX 6800 is being shown significantly faster than the RTX 2080 Ti (roughly RTX 3070 scores). The Ryzen 9 5900X itself is claimed to be a faster gaming processor than Intel's Core i9-10900K, and features PCI-Express 4.0 interface for these next-gen GPUs. Find more results and the interactive graphs in the source link below.

NVIDIA today released GeForce 431.36 WHQL software, which adds support for the new GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super graphics cards that went on sale from 9th July. The drivers also improve optimization for "Tom Clancy's The Division 2," "Strange Brigade," and "Metro Exodus." The drivers add SLI support for "F1 2019." The drivers address the issue of performance counts appearing over the Windows 10 1903 Start menu (since the Start menu is now its own 3D-accelerated process). A "Code 43" error that appears on Windows 1903 machines with Intel "Sandy Bridge" processors has also been fixed. Another critical bug where Windows 1903 doesn't write a crash-dump on BSOD has been fixed.

Among the game-specific fixes are screen flickering noticed in "Grand Theft Auto V" with MSAA enabled; a game-crash experienced in "Forza 4" when driving through tunnels; "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" may experience a TDR crash on GeForce "Pascal" GPU; and staying with this title, its internal benchmark may quit when ray-tracing is enabled. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 431.36 WHQL

NVIDIA Friday released the GeForce Hotfix 430.97 driver. Hotfix drivers are released when NVIDIA needs to address a limited number of glaring issues with a recently released driver, in this case, the 430.86 WHQL and 430.64 WHQL. Released only for Windows 10, the drivers fix a game crash noticed in "Forza Horizon 4" when driving through tunnels. It also addresses a "Code 43" error noticed on machines powered by Intel "Sandy Bridge" processors when trying to install the WDDM 2.6-ready 430.64 WHQL drivers on Windows 10 May 2019 Update (1903). Grab the drivers from the link below.NVIDIA GeForce 430.97 Hotfix

The change-log follows.

NVIDIA today released version 411.70 WHQL of their driver package which brings green performance to your graphics card. The 411.70 WHQL drivers are a Game Ready release, bringing support for Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Forza Horizon 4, and FIFA 19, with improved performance profiles and stability while rendering polygons from these games. Also included is a fix for the high idle power consumption of RTX 2080 & RTX 2080 Ti. We tested it with mixed results. Some other bugs were fixed, too, refer to the changelog for details.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 411.70 WHQL

Update: The full changelog is available now and listed below.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition. Version 18.9.3 beta comes just in time for "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey," posting up to 5% higher performance at 1440p, when tested with a Radeon RX Vega 64; and up to 3% higher performance at 1080p, tested with an RX 580. The game also comes with optimization for "Forza Horizon 4," although AMD did not put out performance guidance for that game. AMD also addressed a couple of issues, beginning with fixing a stutter observed when exceeding FreeSync refresh-rate range in some high frame-rate scenarios. Also addressed is machines with 16 CPU cores experiencing a random system reboot during driver installation, when upgrading from 18.8.1 drivers. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.9.3 beta

The change-log follows.

NVIDIA today released the GeForce 411.64 WHQL "Game Ready" driver to go along with the embargo release for their latest and greatest Turing-based RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards. These drivers come with optimization for upcoming AAA game launches including Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Forza Horizon 4, and Fifa 19. For those of you who pre-ordered the new GPUs, or are going to purchase them imminently, this is the driver you will need to get the most out of the hardware.

Other new features include support for CUDA 10.0, NVIDIA RTX technology, and the new Vulkan 1.1 API. As with any GeForce driver released after April 1, 2018, the driver adds performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes only on Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal and Volta series GPUs. NVIDIA reaffirms that critical security updates will continue to be available on Fermi series GPUs through January 2019. Full release notes, as well as the download options to the driver, can be found in the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 411.63 WHQL

Microsoft Studios' latest entry to the Forza racing series, Forza Horizon 4, launches on PC and XBOX October 2, 2018. In a nice change of pace from the norm these days, a free demo has been released for trial on both platforms. Those interested will have to navigate the Microsoft store, however, as this will join the other Microsoft exclusives in only being available for purchase there and nowhere else. Initial impressions of the demo are positive from media outlets in general, although there were also videos out that showed the game still has random bugs a few weeks out from launch. PC Gamer also shares more details on the demo, and the game alike, which is worth a read if you are a fan of the series.

The demo also included an benchmark mode that offers useful information beyond just an average FPS number. Indeed, we see also a timeline on how the CPU and GPU fared throughout the length of the benchmark, a stutter count, whether the GPU was in a limiting situation or not, and how far off the achieved frame rate was compared to the target number (which can be left unlocked). Initial results from MotoGamesTVon YouTube show an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and AMD Ryzen 7 2700X-based system netting an average of 57 FPS at 4K under Ultra settings, with a similar system netting over 75 FPS in Forza Motorsports 7 from last year. The demo is impressive looking on PC, and we remain curious if a driver update will help gain more performance.

The PC requirements for the latest, upcoming iteration of Forza Horizon (now in its fourth installment) have just been outed. Of course, you wouldn't expect these to be much different from those of Forza Motorsport 6. Forza Horizon 4, developed by Microsoft Games Studios' Playground Games, will launch on October 4th, and promises to take you to new heights in arcade racing.

Being a Games for Windows game, of course, means Windows 10 is part of the minimum requirements - specifically, version 15063.0 of the OS (the Creators Update released back in 2017). Catch up on the rest of the requirements after the break - but if you have an Intel i3-4170, or an NVIDIA GT 740/ AMD R7 250X, you're gold for the minimum.