AMD Polaris GPUs Stumble Over Forspoken’s DX12 Feature Requirements

(Image credit: Square Enix)

AMD’s venerable Polaris architecture graphics cards are showing their age, with one of the hottest new titles simply refusing to run. The PC game on everyone’s lips in January 2023, Forspoken, has DirectX 12 feature-level 12_1 API requirements that the stoic Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 series graphics cards can’t satisfy.

That the aging AMD Polaris graphics cards have finally started to be too old to party like they used to was highlighted by Redditor xCurio. They contrasted the inability of Polaris to run the PC game du jour, Forspoken, when the even older GeForce GTX 960 or GTX 970 cards (Maxwell architecture) can be used.

If we check out the published minimum system requirements for Forspoken, it can be seen that gamers are expected to use a system with at least an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB in the graphics card section or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. These are RDNA 1 and Pascal architecture graphics cards, respectively. Despite the clear minimum recommendation for an RDNA 1 or better GPU, it is still a surprise that the older Polaris isn't even able to run Forspoken.

AMD released a new Adrenalin graphics driver with optimizations ready to support Forspoken just a couple of days ago, but this driver is for use with its Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 3) graphics cards only. Curiously, the red team hasn't provided any driver updates for earlier Radeon RX series GPUs since December 8, while the RX 7000 series have received four driver updates since that time. So if you have a Vega, RDNA 1 or RDNA 2 architecture graphics card, we hope Forspoken won't be an unpleasant experience due to technical issues. We're also hopeful that AMD has a new Adrenalin graphics driver complete or almost ready in the pipeline for pre-RDNA 3 architecture graphics card owners.

In the meantime, Forspoken isn’t receiving the warmest reception from gamers. For example, if you check the Steam user reviews section, many recommend holding off for a few weeks or months until patches have ironed out the launch wrinkles. Another benefit of this strategy is that it could also receive a price cut. Pleasingly, there is a free demo to try if you are curious about this epic action RPG adventure game.

Mark Tyson is a Freelance News Writer at Tom's Hardware US. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

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25 Comments Comment from the forums

zecoeco

It is not unexpected for a 6 year old GPU.
It's obvious and already stated by the game "RX 5500 XT" which is RDNA-based, the minimum requirement to support the game at its minimum visuals (720p 30fps).
The game itself recommends an RTX 3070/RX 6700 XT for a good experience, and that is already pretty high-end.
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Sleepy_Hollowed

Yep, the game is a GPU/CPU buster. It’s hitting the 7 year ceiling for AAA games, they just happen to make a cutoff of what to support at 12_1.

if a lot of new games are going that route, that might get the GPUs selling a tiny bit.
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PlaneInTheSky

In the meantime, Forspoken isn’t receiving the warmest reception from gamers. For example, if you check the Steam user reviews section, many recommend holding off for a few weeks or months until patches have ironed out the launch wrinkles.

The game annoyed me enough that I gave it a thumbs down on Steam and a 0 on Metacritic.

The game ran very poorly on my 3060, couldn't even get 60fps in 1080p. Ridiculous.
The childish dialogue involving constant cursing was horrible.
The gameplay was very clumsy, I hate games where you have to select abilities on a center wheel during combat.
The world is boring and monotonous.
The $70 price for this disaster is ridiculous, who does Square Enix think they are. thank God for Steam refunds.After the Death Stranding disaster, the Sonic Frontiers disaster, and now the Forspoken disaster, I had about enough of Japanese games for now.

Looking forward to Hogwarts Legacy that actually looks good.
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3ogdy

The system requirements for Ultra settings are so high, that they ask for CPUs that don't even exist. Imagine that.
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Elusive Ruse

The game is the hottest mess around TBH.
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InvalidError

Sleepy_Hollowed said:
Yep, the game is a GPU/CPU buster. It’s hitting the 7 year ceiling for AAA games, they just happen to make a cutoff of what to support at 12_1.

if a lot of new games are going that route, that might get the GPUs selling a tiny bit.
Or it could go the other way with budget gamers simply skipping anything that requires a newer DX support level than their GPU supports. On Steam's survey, Polaris 470-590 accounts for 4-5% of the market, not too much of a loss for the developers.
Reply
Metal Messiah.

The minimum system requirements do not list Polaris GPUs, so this shouldn't come as a surprise, and I'm almost certain the game DEVs did not code the game for older hardware, hence the feature-level requirement. Though, the game should have at least run/start on Polaris cards, no?.This would mean that gamers running older Polaris GPUs are unable to run Forspoken but the good thing is that even if they could, the game would hardly run for them since it requires a ton of performance and even modern-day GPUs have a hard time running it unless you are using some sort of upsampling technique.

Even if you could run the game, the title itself isn't any good with a lackluster storyline, generic gameplay, and some of the worst dialogue choices ever used for a AAA production. But nonetheless, another major over-hyped AAA game bites the dust ! And not to mention so many technical issues currently plaguing the game.

If you ask me, Graphics-wise, Forspoken does not look as impressive as its initial in-engine reveal trailer. Its lighting system, in particular, looks as old-gen-ish as it can get. I don’t want to be negative here, but this does not feel like a current-gen-only game.

Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t look THAT bad or anything. For instance, there are some cool particles effects, as well as amazing wind effects. However, and while the game does not use a dynamic day/night cycle, its pre-baked lighting looks worse than the one from Final Fantasy XV (assuming you have played this title).

Hell, it can even look worse than Uncharted 4. And then we have car lights that do NOT cast shadows. The original Watch_Dogs and Grand Theft Auto 4 had this feature, but Forspoken is suddenly unable to provide such a thing. Some distant objects/textures also look really blurry. And, for a game requiring more than 10GB of VRAM at least on higher resolution, this is unacceptable.

Forspoken is a huge technical disappointment. Not only was the game downgraded from its initial reveal, but it also has numerous performance/optimization issues. Furthermore, the game does not justify its huge GPU requirements. And don’t get me started with its borked RT implementation. Or its frame pacing issues. Or its AUDIO issues more importantly.Luminous Productions will have to improve a LOT of things. Honestly, though, I don’t really believe they’re willing to do so. Nevertheless, I’d like to be proven wrong, so the ball is in Luminous’ and Square Enix’s court!
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Neilbob

The system requirements these days always strike me as kind of amateurish, almost as if the people involved don't quite know what they're talking about - most notably where at Ultra the display resolution is noted as 2160p, but at this kind of resolution the CPU needs typically decrease, rather than increase because the heavy lifting all falls to the graphics. Hopefully some kind of benchmark to show it, but I'd bet that Ryzen 5 1600 in the minimum wouldn't be terribly far behind the Ryzen ... 5 ... 5800X in the ultra at 4K.

Not that I've any interest in this or pretty much any other modern game, and I've seen enough reviews of this one to recognise that it should be avoided, at least for a while.
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Metteec

I would not count out the Polaris just yet. It matters not that Forspoken fails on these older chips. It barely runs well on my RTX 3090 with 1440p average fps of 67 dropping to 18 fps and texture pop-in/crashing in some instances. The graphics are blurry even at max settings. I don't think that Forspoken represents the "next gen" and what to expect for the future. Rather, it is just an example of lazy programming and poor optimization, another game rushed to the fore by Square Enix. As another poster mentioned, there is still life in the Polaris GPUs with other AAA games like Harry Potter, Dead Space, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Dead Island 2, and Starfield that will run well with the right graphics settings. You can bet that those games will still look great at reasonable framerates even with a Polaris GPU.
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brandonjclark

Metteec said:
I would not count out the Polaris just yet. It matters not that Forspoken fails on these older chips. It barely runs well on my RTX 3090 with 1440p average fps of 67 dropping to 18 fps and texture pop-in/crashing in some instances. The graphics are blurry even at max settings. I don't think that Forspoken represents the "next gen" and what to expect for the future. Rather, it is just an example of lazy programming and poor optimization, another game rushed to the fore by Square Enix. As another poster mentioned, there is still life in the Polaris GPUs with other AAA games like Harry Potter, Dead Space, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Dead Island 2, and Starfield that will run well with the right graphics settings. You can bet that those games will still look great at reasonable framerates even with a Polaris GPU.

Yup. This game is just REALLY poorly optimized. My 3090 runs just about anything at 2k fast as hell.
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