Square Enix is trying something new with the fantasy action role-playing game Forspoken. ComputerBase took a close look at the technology. In addition to the usual graphics card benchmarks, the focus is on the DirectStorage premiere, ray tracing and the upsampling techniques AMD FSR 2 and Nvidia DLSS 2.
When looking at the loading times determined by the benchmark, it is noticeable: With a fast NVMe SSD (in the test system, the XPG Gammix S70 Blade with PCIe 4.0 x4) the loading times are extremely short, with the SATA SSD (Crucial MX500) they are much longer . At first glance, this supports Microsoft's statement that you need a very fast NVMe SSD to see big differences.
That it is not because DirectStorage is not used with SATA is shown by the fact that both the NVMe and the SATA platforms have slightly longer loading times with the start parameter.
However, it is interesting that both platforms load longer, but the difference between the NVMe and the SATA SSD remains the same. This in turn shows that Forspoken does not achieve the extremely good loading times exclusively or possibly only indirectly via DirectStorage.
The integrated benchmark correctly does not take these loading sequences into account and spits out the same FPS on both systems. And even if the seven scenes of the benchmark are recorded manually without loading breaks, the result is clear: With active DirectStorage, it makes no difference whether Forspoken runs on a SATA or NVMe SSD.
Conclusion
Technically, the PC version of Forspoken has its good and bad points. In the test, the visual quality of the graphics was not as bad as is often read on the Internet. No, Forspoken is not a graphics flagship and could be prettier. But Forspoken is far from an ugly game, quite the opposite in fact: in places, the graphics capture a great atmosphere and there is sometimes an incredible amount of action on the screen. That's fun too.
Good upsampling, average ray tracing
The integration of all modern upsampling technologies can be described as positive: AMD's FSR 2.1, Intel's XeSS and Nvidia's DLSS 2.4 are included, only DLSS 3 or the frame generation is missing. Visually, DLSS and FSR cut a good figure, but cannot keep up with the native resolution in terms of image stability. With the same render resolution, however, FSR and DLSS are clearly superior and deliver a close head-to-head duel with advantages and disadvantages on both sides.
Somewhere in the middle between good and bad is the ray tracing implementation. The RT shadows and ambient occlusion don't cost much performance on either a Radeon or GeForce, but they don't do much visually either. There are the scenes in the city where the RT shadows look better, but without ray tracing the game isn't missing much per se.
The demands on the graphics card are massive
The real big weakness of the PC version of Forspoken is the hardware requirements. In the very demanding test scene, even in Full HD, you have to have a fast graphics card to reach the 60 FPS mark, and in higher resolutions nothing else works better than high end.
With the graphic presets, performance can be squeezed out of a GPU, but even the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti then only achieves 60 FPS in Full HD - with visibly poorer image quality. No game is currently more demanding than Forspoken and the graphics don't justify it.
The developers absolutely have to get even more performance out of it, because currently only a limited recommendation for buying the PC version can be given - depending on how "high end" the GPU in the computer is.