Friday, January 27th 2023
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Forspoken Simply Doesn't Work with AMD Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 "Polaris" GPUs
AMD Radeon RX 400 series and RX 500 series graphics cards based on the "Polaris" graphics architecture are simply unable to run "Forspoken," as users on Reddit report. The game has certain DirectX 12 feature-level 12_1 API requirements that the architecture does not meet. Interestingly, NVIDIA's "Maxwell" graphics architecture, which predates AMD "Polaris" by almost a year, supports FL 12_1, and is able to play the game. Popular GPUs from the "Maxwell" generation include the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 960. Making matters much worse, AMD is yet to release an update to its Adrenalin graphics drivers for the RX Vega, RX 5000, and RX 6000 series that come with "Forspoken" optimization. Its latest 23.1.2 beta drivers that come with these optimizations only support the RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards. It's now been over 50 days since the vast majority of AMD discrete GPUs have received a driver update.
Source:
xCuri0 (Reddit)
86 Comments on Forspoken Simply Doesn't Work with AMD Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 "Polaris" GPUs
The Unlikely Legacy: AMD GFX8 Enters Its Fifth Year - The AMD Radeon RX 590 Review, feat. XFX & PowerColor: Polaris Returns (Again) (anandtech.com)
To quote, bold parts added by me: These 4 years ago on an article written in 2018, and 2018 itself is four years behind us... That day has finally arrived. The upside is, open-source software tends to have all crazy kinds of workarounds due to their open nature, so if it's not viable to upgrade your hardware, you can always adopt Linux and keep it going for a while longer. Yeah, it's primarily AMD's fault here. I understand their reasoning: Polaris is by far their best selling architecture with extreme market penetration, and that means that they can easily diagnose problems from that wide swath of users who still run these cards. I'm sure that it was accounted for when they opted to keep driver support for Polaris going, even though they discontinued Tonga and Fiji, that they'd eventually run into this problem. But then again, is it really an issue? Forspoken is not running well on hardware leagues above Polaris. Maxwell boots it but even the 980 Ti and the Titan X can't run it well. The most popular card, the 970, is doing fps on the low teens - just a hard pass, really.
I just have to state it though (not aimed at you RTB) - If one wants to play true next-gen games, ditch Windows 7, ditch your first-generation Core i7 without AVX, grab a GeForce RTX or one of the RX 6000 series cards plus 32 GB of RAM and call it a day. No use endlessly complaining that you're being left behind because you set your foot down and is willing to die on that hill. If you still refuse change, and vowed to "never leave Windows 7" and "my i7-920 is fine, who cares if it's 15 years old, just deal with it"; then buy a PS5 and go on with your life... No public drivers past 22.11.2 have been published for GPUs earlier than RDNA 3 (RX 7000 series) as of today.
I'm just disappointed that I can't run the demo on my GTX 745 which I thought was going to be bottom of the barrel. Going to try it on the RX 6400 this evening.
I've tested it on my laptop's mobile 3050, which should perform about the same as a 6500 XT. It's no good, even with the settings on low + ultra performance DLSS it stutters a crapton. Maxes out the 16GB RAM on the laptop, too.
Apologies for the assholery that transpired as a result on my part.
Years ago, Windows did support OpenGL and it came with an OpenGL runtime. But they stopped doing that.
Of course, this is mostly me being pedantic. Still, contrast this with Linux where Mesa actually provides a runtime for OpenGL or Vulkan - it makes more sense to say that Linux supports Vulkan.
And yes, mobile is a nightmare. I am facepalming the last 15 years every time I hear that something is about to replace PC.
I think the most accurate way of describing this is: Vulkan support is offered, but you are not required to package it.
An end-user facing distro such as Ubuntu or Fedora is going to need these graphics API capabilities to provide their user experience, and that's the point I was trying to make :)
What is stopping AMD from adding the missing feature? Or is that impossible?
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People can say "AMD is the same as Intel and Nvidia" as much as they want. But AMD didn't payed OEMs to not use Intel CPUs and AMD is not paying developers to remove features, neither is locking everything it builds as proprietary stuff. While they are all companies trying to make a profit, their business practices are totally different. If AMD even becomes bigger and more powerful than Intel and Nvidia, it might do worst, until then, they are the most consumer friendly company of the three and also the more open of the three.
I own 4 AMD cards and ALL of them had issues with the drivers at some point, it's something that simply does not happen with nVIDIA cards and denying it is fooling yourself and the rest. I use AMD cards daily, and they're good when it comes to hardware, it's the drivers that are utter bullshit no matter what you do. Ever since ATi and the Catalyst CC died it's been one mistake after another with AMD's drivers, for some reason they never stop "redesigning" something for the worse.