Like magic, the 2023-07-27 Stable Update came and I installed it this morning.
Along with a bunch of stuff, the NVIDIA driver was updated from 535.54.03 to 535.86.05
Now Forza seems MUCH MORE STABLE:
- When I started the game, I got the normal “Processing Vulkan Shaders” dialog that I had not seen before
- When Forza first starts, I STILL get the “Unable to detect graphics driver version…” dialog box but I just click IGNORE
- Once at the main menu, I hit CONTINUE and the game NO LONGER takes 3 Minutes to start but starts in about 20 seconds.
- I tested it quite a bit this evening and it never crashed. After about an hour of playing, the short lags started happening more often, but quitting the game and restarting it fixed that.
UPDATE 2023-07-28:
The game STILL crashes but I can usually play for at least an hour. Crashes seems completely random. It crashed after 1hr 10min, then after only 16min, then after 2hr 5min.