Square Enix has just released Forspoken on PC and things are not looking particularly well. One of the biggest features of this title was its support for DirectStorage. And, after closer examination, it appears that DirectStorage support is available on both Windows 10 and Windows 11.
However, the game has major stutters and frame pacing issues. Below you can find some screenshots from its built-in benchmark tool. As you can see, the framegraph is all over the place. Not only that, but our CPU was downclocking due to these frame pacing issues.
Our PC test system was Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz, NVIDIA’s RTX 4090, Windows 10 and the latest version of the GeForce drivers. We’ve also installed the game on a Samsung 970 Pro Plus SSD.
My guess is that the game constantly loads new assets and as a result of that, performance goes downhill. In theory, DirectStorage should have eliminated this issue. In our initial article, we said that DirectStorage was only available on Windows 11. It appears we were wrong though. The game loads in less than a second (when you press continue). This indicates that DirectStorage actually works.
Due to these frame pacing issues, we cannot share right now our initial PC performance impressions. At native 4K/Max Settings and with Ray Tracing, our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 was dropping below 60fps. The game features Ray Tracing Shadows and Ambient Occlusion on PC. Moreover, it supports both AMD FSR 2.0 and NVIDIA DLSS 2.
For those wondering, at 4K the game can run perfectly fine with 16GB of RAM. During the benchmark sequence, our overall PC system RAM usage never went over 14GB. And yes, as the title suggests, the game does have shader compilation stutters.
Lastly, there are some awful audio issues with 5.1 audio devices. The audio is generally a mess, and you’ll have to force 2.1 via Windows in order to resolve this. I don’t know how on Earth Square Enix has messed up something like that, but here we are. Seriously, listen to this.
Stay tuned for our PC Performance Analysis!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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