AMD users who want to test out Square Enix and Luminous Productions’ new fantasy RPG on older hardware may be out of luck. According to various reports online, AMD Polaris GPUs aren’t capable of running Forspoken because they lack support for DirectX 12_1, a higher feature level of DirectX 12 that differentiates itself in categories that include conservative rasterization. Critics of AMD have been quick to point out that these GPUs “only” came out in 2017 and that NVIDIA’s older Maxwell GPUs (est. 2014) can run Forspoken fine, as they include the required support. Forspoken is said to be such a demanding game that there’s no reason why anyone should attempt playing it on anything other than modern hardware, however.
From a Wccftech report:
AMD launched its Polaris GPUs back in 2017 and it was followed by two refreshed later in the lineup. Powering the Radeon RX 400 and Radeon RX 500 series, these were the first GPUs that aimed to move away from the older GCN architecture and targeted the mainstream segment, promising unquestionably good value and performance.
Back then, AMD was touted to have the better drivers and DirectX 12 readiness for its GPUs but a few years later, we have the same Polaris GPUs unable to run Forspoken, a title that requires at the very least, DirectX 12_1 feature level support. Unfortunately, AMD’s Polaris GPUs don’t have DirectX 12_1 feature level support which is a bummer considering NVIDIA’s Maxwell GPUs that date back to 2014 (GeForce 900 Series) have that.