Forspoken's PC system requirements are demanding, kind of baffling
Most people play on settings not mentioned
Steam's most recent hardware survey says that 65% of PC players use 1080p, but you wouldn't know it to look at Forspoken's system requirements which benchmark the game against 720p 30fps (minimum), 1440p 30fps (recommended) and 2160p 60fps (ultra).
Regardless of what kind of performance you're aiming for, you'll need a pretty beefy machine, with 24GB of RAM and an RTX 3070 required to hit those recommended specs.
Square Enix announced the system requirements alongside a new trailer highlighting PC specific features:
The requirements start off fairly demanding even at the 720p low-end: an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 or Intel Core i7-3770, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB or Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, and 16GB of RAM. That same Steam hardware survey suggests 30% of people have less RAM than that.
It's then a big step up to those specs Square Enix recommend: a Ryzen 5 3600 or i7-8700, and Radeon 6700 XT 12GB or GeForce RTX 3070 8GB, with the aforementioned 24GB of RAM.
I'm not sure where that leaves me and the 65% of people who expect or hope to play most games on 1080p at as close to 60fps as possible. I've got a GeForce GTX 1660 6GB and 16GB of RAM, so maybe I'll fit into the pocket between minimum and recommended. Minimmended. Or perhaps I should expect to slope down towards 720p to avoid stuttering - I've really no idea, and these system requirements don't help me.
I'd test my system by trying the Forspoken demo, but it wasn't released on PC and disappointed some who played it on PS5. We're also not getting review code on RPS until launch day, so expect our impressions of it to be delayed - and possibly delay your own purchase of a £65/$70 game accordingly.
Here's the full set of requirements:
One nice feature is that the game supports DirectStorage. That means that if you've got an SSD that supports it, you should be able to enjoy faster load times on those fancy textures.