Forspoken Simply Doesn't Work with AMD Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 "Polaris" GPUs

[john_]

You should be ashamed of yourself for the nonsense you bring to this forum/website.

Probably proud is the correct word here. I mean people who are trying to make TechPowerUp look more like the Wccftech comment section, they are probably proud with all that stuff they post here.

Not being able to run a game due to missing instructions is somehow nvidia fault now? Friggin lol.

If the features of DX 12_1 are in fact in good use and the game absolutely needs them, it's not Nvidia's fault. And to be honest, I doubt Nvidia has any reason to target Polaris. Nvidia's marketing department could be using it indirectly by suggesting catchy headlines to tech sites, making this another example of "AMD hardware bad, AMD's drivers bad" stuff. But that's their job and the only to blame here are tech sites using, as usual, click bait titles. So again nothing new.

But in the past we do have cases where Nvidia is somehow involved. The DX 10.1 removal from the first Assassin's Creed game, the tessellated ocean under the city in Crysis 2, all those games with PhysX support that where running like slideshows in systems not using an Nvidia as a primary card, or where offering crap even non existing physics without PhysX, all those games using GameWorks libraries that are close code, or features like HairWorks, again close code. The fact that Nvidia was even punishing (in a way) it's own customers when using another brand's hardware as primary video adapter, by dissabling CUDA and PhysX support, is also an indication of a company that could easily move behind close doors to make it's hardware artificially look better than the competition. So, suspecting Nvidia for having to do something that makes AMD look worst, does have a base. AMD sometimes manages to do damage to itself without any help from others, but some times it's not their fault.

In this case the choice of not implementing 12_1 support is theirs alone. Until today it didn't cost them. Today the get more negative headlines.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Yea I had heard some mention online about this because these cards lack DX 12_1 support. I mean, I had not even heard of this game until I heard of this issue. Now while that sucks, a nearly 6-year-old mid-range $230 card not supporting a modern game is definitely weird but not that farfetched (At least in how much performance you can expect). I mean I am not happy about it as I would hope these cards would at least allow it to start up, but unfortunately that is the case.

It's actually closer to nine years old. GCN 3 (Tonga and Fiji, now discontinued) and GCN 4 (Polaris) have identical ISA, in fact, no documentation was even written for GCN 4 since its programmability is exactly identical to that of GCN 3. This is an excellent read on the subject:

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:

The flip side to that however is that it does underscore AMD’s technical situation. This is a D3D feature level 12_0 part – meaning it lacks 12_1 features like conservative rasterization and raster ordered views. Which was fine back in 2014, but NVIDIA has been shipping 12_1 hardware since 2014 and AMD since 2017. So from one perspective, a brand-new Radeon RX 590 in 2018 is still lacking graphics features introduced by GPUs 4 years ago.

Ultimately however this is not a consumer concern, but more of a developer concern. The launch of a new feature level 12_0 GPU and card series – and one I expect will sell moderately well – means that the clock has been pushed back on developers being able to use 12_1 features as a baseline in their games. RX 590 cards are going to be around for a while even after their day is done, and developers will need to include support for them. All of which is going to make things very interesting once we reach the next generation of consoles, and multi-platform simplicity butts heads with PC compatibility.

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.

Not being able to run a game due to missing instructions is somehow nvidia fault now? Friggin lol.

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...

Wtf. latest drivers release has bin all for the 7x00 / 6x00 generation. but not the cards before obviously.

No public drivers past 22.11.2 have been published for GPUs earlier than RDNA 3 (RX 7000 series) as of today.

 

[R-T-B]

If the features of DX 12_1 are in fact in good use and the game absolutely needs them, it's not Nvidia's fault.

I mean I guess you are implying they are bribing them to needlessly require instructions to defeat what, a nearly decade old GPU? I'm really not buying that.

 

[john_]

I mean I guess you are implying they are bribing them to needlessly require instructions to defeat what, a nearly decade old GPU? I'm really not buying that.

My God, do you people read what the other person wrote?

If the features of DX 12_1 are in fact in good use and the game absolutely needs them, it's not Nvidia's fault. And to be honest, I doubt Nvidia has any reason to target Polaris.

AND WHY DO YOU CUT MY POST THERE AND THEN YOU POST MY REPLY AS YOURS? with just different wording

 

[coozie78]

Why so much concern for one game that would run like a slideshow on these cards?

 

[Lew Zealand]

Why so much concern for one game that would run like a slideshow on these cards?

It gives those who love to pick sides and sling mud at the "other team" lotsa useless ammunition.

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.

 

[sepheronx]

Instead be concerned why we care how a shitty game runs.

 

[Dr. Dro]

It gives those who love to pick sides and sling mud at the "other team" lotsa useless ammunition.

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.

The RX 6400 will work. It has DirectX 12 Ultimate. However, drivers optimized for Forspoken that are compatible with it haven't been published by AMD yet, so the results you get may not be really valid.

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.

 

[R-T-B]

My God, do you people read what the other person wrote?

AND WHY DO YOU CUT MY POST THERE AND THEN YOU POST MY REPLY AS YOURS? with just different wording

Because I was on a shitty mobile connection and that's legit all of your post I got over it, what I quoted... weird as heck but that's all I can chalk it up to because I did not intentionally edit your quote.
Apologies for the assholery that transpired as a result on my part.

 

[medi01]

Interestingly, NVIDIA's "Maxwell" graphics architecture

Ah. another day with free ad for the filthy green...

they said it use vulkan api

Which isn't available on Windoze right? Or is it.

 

[brutlern]

Why is everyone playing the blame game here? How long do you expect an old hardware to be supported in the future? It's the same thing with old CPUs that do not support SSE3/4 for example. In those cases everyone blames the developer for using a feature not supported by old hardware. But in this case nobody blames the developer for using a feature not supported by old hardware. Nobody has timemachines, nobody has crystal balls, at some point old hardware will become just that, old hardware. Some hardware will age better, some worse. Why doesn't nvidia's Pascal support DX12_2? Sometime in the future a game will come out which will need 12_2 and than everyone will complain why this or that card doesn't support it? Yes, it this specific case nvidia decided to implement a new technology 1 generation earlier than AMD. Awesome, it generated some good advertising for them 7 years later. Given the extremely high requirements of this game, does it even matter?

 

[Prima.Vera]

There comes a time when crap hardware is crap hardware. Sometimes games have to move along but in a meaningful way.

Yeah, but the game is way crappier also, so no loss here.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Which isn't available on Windoze right? Or is it.

Windows supports Vulkan and you can generally use DXVK to convert a DirectX game into a Vulkan one. However this incurs a further performance penalty which may be too much for this graphics card architecture to bear.

 

[bug]

Windows supports Vulkan and you can generally use DXVK to convert a DirectX game into a Vulkan one. However this incurs a further performance penalty which may be too much for this graphics card architecture to bear.

Strictly speaking, Windows does not support Vulkan. But programs/games can pack their own Vulkan runtimes and they'll run just fine.
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.

 

[yannus1]

It's all an API issue. Microsoft DirectX is a plague. It's not a real technical limitation, DirectX should have had an automatic bypass. DirectX is Microsoft planned obsolescence weapon. If it runs on Linux when it wasn't even designed for it, come on.

 

[john_]

Because I was on a shitty mobile connection and that's legit all of your post I got over it, what I quoted... weird as heck but that's all I can chalk it up to because I did not intentionally edit your quote.
Apologies for the assholery that transpired as a result on my part.

While I AM a fan of AMD, when posting I DO TRY to be objective.

And yes, mobile is a nightmare. I am facepalming the last 15 years every time I hear that something is about to replace PC.

 

[bug]

It's all an API issue. Microsoft DirectX is a plague. It's not a real technical limitation, DirectX should have had an automatic bypass. DirectX is Microsoft planned obsolescence weapon. If it runs on Linux when it wasn't even designed for it, come on.

Afaik, DX offers the ability to query for capabilities and the code can adapt based on that. But there's no reason for the game to include a code path for hardware that doesn't meet the system requirements.

 

[Dr. Dro]

It's all an API issue. Microsoft DirectX is a plague. It's not a real technical limitation, DirectX should have had an automatic bypass. DirectX is Microsoft planned obsolescence weapon. If it runs on Linux when it wasn't even designed for it, come on.

Hadn't you been talking about a nine year old graphics IP, i'd agree, but you are, so...

Afaik, DX offers the ability to query for capabilities and the code can adapt based on that. But there's no reason for the game to include a code path for hardware that doesn't meet the system requirements.

Precisely. Anyway, Linux supports Vulkan the same way Windows supports DirectX i guess - some level of functionality must be present for the GUI and general user experience to work... and that is fine. I'm just glad both standards are interchangeable to some degree.

 

[bug]

Precisely. Anyway, Linux supports Vulkan the same way Windows supports DirectX i guess - some level of functionality must be present for the GUI and general user experience to work... and that is fine. I'm just glad both standards are interchangeable to some degree.

Not really. Strictly speaking, Linux is just an OS kernel, video acceleration does not reside there. If you're considering Linux as a distribution, then you have Vulkan (and OpenGL) support via Mesa. But even then, many Linux installs are headless, being targeted at servers and whatnot. And then there's Android...

I think the most accurate way of describing this is: Vulkan support is offered, but you are not required to package it.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Not really. Strictly speaking, Linux is just an OS kernel, video acceleration does not reside there. If you're considering Linux as a distribution, then you have Vulkan (and OpenGL) support via Mesa. But even then, many Linux installs are headless, being targeted at servers and whatnot. And then there's Android...

I think the most accurate way of describing this is: Vulkan support is offered, but you are not required to package it.

You get what I mean, though. Windows experience isn't as customizable as Linux due to it not being open source software, and indeed i doubt the NT kernel itself would require DirectX to function on its own, but we really went into the whole semantics

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

 

[bug]

You get what I mean, though. Windows experience isn't as customizable as Linux due to it not being open source software, and indeed i doubt the NT kernel itself would require DirectX to function on its own, but we really went into the whole semantics

You'd be surprised what the Windows kernel requires, at some point Microsoft couldn't rip the Internet Explorer engine off from there. https://arstechnica.com/information...nside-minwin-the-windows-7-kernel-slims-down/

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

That is correct. But even in this regard, there's the "war" with Nvidia that doesn't use Mesa and provides their own implementation and runtime. But out-of-the-box, support is there and can be used, even if in software emulation, non-accelerated mode.

 

[Blaeza]

Was going to download the demo, but 42gb! It can stay crap and never see my system! Would this be a good time to ebay my Sapphire 470?

What is stopping AMD from adding the missing feature? Or is that impossible?

 

[R-T-B]

What is stopping AMD from adding the missing feature? Or is that impossible?

They can emulate it. It'll be slow of course, but then, so will everything on this game on a card that old.

 

[Roph]

When many many years ago, AMD had support for DirectX 10.1 and Nvidia didn't, their products where still at 10.0, a known company released a patch that was adding DirectX 10.1 support to a known game, that latter whould also became one of the most known series. Somehow that company was convinced to remove that patch.

Why would you word it like this? Is it meant to be secret that this was Ubisoft with Assassin's Creed?

 

[john_]

Why would you word it like this? Is it meant to be secret that this was Ubisoft with Assassin's Creed?

Didn't wanted to focus on the game, but on the example. I do write about Assassin's Creed in another post with a link in an old article about what happened. And the fact that it was an Nvidia sponsored title is mentioned in that article.
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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.