The PS5 version of Forspoken will reportedly have loading times that are barely a second long. Speaking about the Luminous Engine’s features in an interview for Game Developers Conference 2022, the technical director of engine, Teppei Ono, spoke about how Forspoken benefited from technologies on PS5 and PC.
Ono stated that the PS5’s M.2 SSD was integral in bringing down Forspoken’s load times on the console. While the PS5 version is set to have load times of less than a second, load times on the PC will apparently vary between 2 seconds and 22 seconds, depending on whether the PC is running Forspoken off an M.2 SSD, a SATA SSD, or hard drives with a range of speeds.
The PC version also makes use of the relatively new DirectStorage technology on Windows 10 and 11 to shorten load times from M.2 SSDs. The technology, originally making its debut on Xbox Series X/S, was released on PC in March. It is worth noting that DirectStorage has a few requirements, including a DirectX 12-compatible graphics card that supports Shader Model 6.0.
Both the PC and PS5 versions of Forspoken also make use of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 technology, which makes use of temporal upscaling to make games look better while keeping the overall hardware usage down. FSR can be directly compared to Nvidia’s DLSS technology, but the key difference is that while DLSS requires an Nvidia RTX graphics card, AMD’s FSR is not exclusive to AMD’s graphics cards.
Back in March, Square Enix had released a trailer for Forspoken that showed off the game making use of both of these technologies. Forspoken is out on PS5 and PC on October 11.