Square Enix did not provide a Forspoken PC review copy to anyone ahead of launch, leading fans to fear the worst for the optimization on the platform.

Surprisingly, Forspoken PC comes with a built-in benchmark that not only tests frame rate across a series of environments but also measures load times, which is appropriate for the first Microsoft DirectStorage game.

This was the quickest load time in our Forspoken PC benchmark test with only 1.485 seconds, rivaling those found on PlayStation 5, though the frame rate is slightly lower at 77 FPS.

Forspoken PC does not seem to take advantage of the latest version of DirectStorage (1.1), which adds GPU decompression like RTX IO, even if the developers themselves had asked for it during GDC 2022.

Besides that, the PS5's architecture (and the Xbox Series X's, too) has been engineered around delivering the quickest load times, and the PC gaming environment isn't there yet despite its faster NVMe drives.

And there's not much point in toning down the graphics to get an exceedingly high frame rate here since it's a single player open world action RPG, not a competitive multiplayer game.