Enlarge / Maserati + 4K + Windows 10 + Forza Horizon 3 = …uh, this doesn’t seem like a good math problem. (credit: Playground Games / Turn 10 Studios)

Our Forza Horizon 3 game review from earlier this week took a long, hard look at Microsoft Studios’ latest open-world racer. Short version: it’s a damned good continuation of Forza‘s wilder half, and while its physics system felt looser and lighter under the wheel-controller hands of cars editor Jonathan Gitlin than he expected (even based on FH2, mind you), he still believed it deserved a spot at the top of the current open-world racer ecosystem.

We don’t normally return to games after their releases to analyze performance, and certainly not only three days after a review publishes, but FH3 just so happens to be the first PC racing game sold by Microsoft in… gosh, 16 years! The company’s last retail PC racer was 2000’s Motocross Madness 2, while this year’s sim-minded Forza Motorsport 6 Apex doesn’t count because it was an experimental freebie—albeit an amazing and surprising one, at least in terms of performance.

That Apex release was probably easier to optimize for high-end PC performance, since it forced players to stick to specific racetracks (and could therefore limit on-screen elements like draw distance and geometry at any given moment). FH3, on the other hand, isn’t just an open-world game; it’s an outright romp that begs its players to kick up trails of dust, water droplets, and tree branches while competing against tons of AI-controlled opponents in no-rails races.