In terms of image quality, Forza Horizon is clean. Extremely clean. In fact, you've got to work really hard to come up with any other 360 game that gets close - the later DiRT titles are probably the nearest parallel. In Codemasters' accomplished racing titles, hardware 4x multi-sampling is utilised which in concert with some impressive post-processing effects yields some impressive results. But Forza Horizon goes beyond that. In an era where game developers are killing off the memory and bandwidth-intensive MSAA in favour of the much cheaper post-process equivalents, Playground's solution is comparatively lavish. Not only is 4x MSAA retained - in line with the replays and time trials of Forza Motorsport 4 - FXAA is added too. According to the developer, this is dynamically applied when there is GPU time left over.
As a technical achievement, Forza Horizon is outstanding. It possesses all the fundamental strengths of the Forza Motorsport engine, compromising in one key aspect - frame-rate - but reaping the considerable rewards in almost every other. The overall look and feel of the game is almost untouchable, with an extremely high standard of production values applied to almost every visual element - everything meshes together beautifully, making for a best-in-class presentation. While input latency lags behind the Turn 10 series staples owing to the frame-rate cut, Forza Horizon still works well because once you've adjusted to the feel of the controls, the response is absolutely rock solid.