Yes, Forspoken does not run on AMD’s RX 400/500 series GPUs

Forspoken is unplayable with AMD’s older Polaris series GPUs

Over the weekend, several reports have claimed that Forspoken did not run on AMD’s RX 400/500 series GPUs, graphics cards that are amongst AMD’s most popular legacy products.

While Forspoken’s PC system requirements list AMD’s RX 5500 XT as the game’s minimum GPU, AMD’s older RX 480, RX 580, and RX 590 graphics cards are able to deliver similar or identical performance levels in many games, leading many gamers to assume that their RX 400/500 series Polaris GPUs would run the game with the right settings.

We have put Forspoken’s Polaris compatibility claims to the test and have confirmed that the game was not playable on our AMD Radeon RX 480. While the game booted, it crashes when attempting to enter the game’s options menu, and while we would run the game and its benchmarking tool, the game crashed frequently and did not deliver a playable experience. In short, Forspoken on Polaris is an utter mess.

It is alleged that AMD’s Polaris series graphics cards do not support a high enough tier of DirectX 12 to run Forspoken properly. Newer AMD GPUs like AMD’s RX Vega series can run Forspoken without any issues, while Nvidia’s Maxwell and newer GPUs appear to run the game without issue.  

There is always a point where older graphics cards become irrelevant for modern gaming, and it looks like that time is approaching for AMD’s Polaris series. This is bad news for owners of AMD’s popular RX 480, RX 580 and RX 590 graphics cards, all of which utilise AMD’s Polaris silicon. At some point, the industry has to move on.

Looking further ahead, we expect more future games to not be supported on older DirectX 12 graphics cards. At some point, the DirectX 12 Ultimate Feature set will become a baseline for many modern games, and that means that RX 5000 series and older AMD CPUs and non-RTX Nvidia GPUs will be left behind by these future titles. We already have games like Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition that do not support graphics cards without ray tracing acceleration, and there is no reason be believe that future games won’t have similar restrictions. 

You can join the discussion on Forspoken being broken on AMD’s RX 400/500 Polaris series GPUs on the OC3D Forums.