It has been rumored that the loading times for the PlayStation 5 version of Forspoken will be less than one second long. During an interview for the Game Developers Conference 2022, the technical director of the Luminous Engine, Teppei Ono, discussed the capabilities of the engine and discussed how Forspoken on PS5 benefited from technology on PS5 and PC.
According to Ono, the M.2 SSD in the PlayStation 5 was a crucial component in reducing the amount of time necessary for the game Forspoken to load on the device. Load times for the PlayStation 5 version are planned to be less than one second, but it appears that load times for the PC version will range anywhere from two seconds to twenty-two seconds. This appears to be the case regardless of whether the PC is running Forspoken off of an M.2 SSD, a SATA SSD, or hard drives with varying transfer rates.
In addition, the DirectStorage technology that’s available on Windows 10 and 11 in the PC version is used to cut down on load times from M.2 solid-state drives (SSDs). In March, the technology that was initially introduced on the Xbox Series X/S was made available for use on personal computers. It is important to keep in mind that DirectStorage has a few prerequisites, the most important of which is a graphics card that is compatible with DirectX 12 and that also supports Shader Model 6.0.
Both the PC and PS5 versions of Forspoken make use of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 technology. This technology employs temporal upscaling in order to improve the appearance of games while also reducing the amount of hardware that is required to run them. The FSR technology from AMD can be directly compared to the DLSS technology from Nvidia; however, the most important distinction is that DLSS requires an Nvidia RTX graphics card, whereas the FSR technology from AMD is not restricted to AMD’s graphics cards.
In the month of March, Square Enix disseminated a promotional video for the upcoming video game Forspoken, in which the game was shown to make use of both of these technologies. Forspoken will be available on October 11 for both the PS5 and the computer.