Oh crap, this has had constant issues with crashing and stutters and generally not running very well, since it's kind of been abandoned for the past 18 months, I was optimistic that when they were adding it to game pass they'd kind of put a little TLC in and fix it, yes the most recent NVIDIA driver has been CTD for me to
tried disabling Avast and seemed better, but still CTD with latest Nvidia drivers.
rolled back to 442.50 drivers and played for a while this morning and no crashing, also no stuttering, ace...
ramped up scaling to 200% with all options on highest and still 100fps, nice.
but... there's a few graphics issues...
1) flags in the crowds sometimes jump in their animation, found a vid of this bug:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFDRzLlRrP4
2) lights/lighting sometimes seem to flash randomly (e.g. some bridges seem to flash bright/dull and the driver on the menu screen is sometimes lit on/off).
3) night race in EB111 and the car's headlights glitch on/off randomly
also, it would be nice to tweak the LOD, as you can sometimes see the jump from low geometry models to nice ones...
buggy mess tbh...
while googling the bugs I read:
---For flags flickering---
-use RENDER SCALE only at 100%, more will introduce flags flickering.
-use SHADOW QUALITY only at DYNAMIC, Ultra,High or anything else will introduce flags flickering.
---For LODs at night race---
-use CAR MODEL QUALITY at DYNAMIC, anything else will introduce a very bad LODs.
(if you race by day you can change this settings to ULTRA, it's more beautiful than dynamic by day)
so, I'll now try turning all the options back to dynamic (but I'll try keeping 200% scaling).
*edit*
I also do not understand the homologation rubbish... I know it's to try and keep all cars on the track competitive, but isn't that the point of the D, C, B etc. bands from all previous Forzas??? I bought a 2013 MX5, rated D at stock, went to race open class and the game wanted me to "homologate" it to the top limit of S class. So, back to tuning and returned it to stock and as the "manual homologation" option, so thought I'd try turning it into a C class event. Added a couple bits to get it to C rating, went to the event and it's back to forcing me to upgrade it to an S class rating?!?!? Given the D, C, B etc. ranks are there to score each car, so why does it force me to jump my MX5 to S rank, instead of being happy populating the field with D, C, B, etc. ranked oppositions to match whatever rank I've tuned the car to?!? Given some of the appeal of the game is tuning/modding the car for more and more events, it seems rubbish that it forces you to the pre-defined "race spec" for that car - unless I've missed something really obvious...