I'm really glad that you guys posted some real life examples.
I did manage to do a quick test on the forspoken demo myself. I will post two videos and a reminder this is a hobbyist channel, non monetized, not clickbaiting.
I did a test on my 8600k+1070, although I used custom settings, with something the system could actually run.
At the very beginning, after I show the settings (some of them were on high mind you), I load a save and the game starts in like 1 second. And IT IS actually loading. I have the MSI Afterburner OSD measuring the HDD1 throughput, which is the nvme on that system. It is the first time I have seen the nvme of that system going so far up to 1GB/sec reading, during gaming. Moreover it loads like crazy during gameplay, you can clearly see it showing hundreds of MB/sec at times.
Therefore I have to take back my "son,I'm disappoint" meme comment. I am not disappoint at all. I am actually impressed! And also the game did not run that bad, for how heavy it is, in conjunction with these specific settings. Considering it's a 2016 card, it's doing great.
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For the kicks of it, I did a test on my 2700k+GTX 970, lol.
Same format, first showing the settings, then load the same save. It loads really fast on this old geezer as well. Not 1 sec fast, but fast. You can again see the MSI Afterburner OSD hitting 500MB/sec speed, which is good. This is the first time I have used the SSD of this system for gaming though. It could be the same on other games. However you see it though, it is admirable that a system with what is essentially a 12yo architecture, manages to have all this world setup and ready in 3-4 seconds, even at low. I will try to do more testing in the future, with a better video card and higher settings.
As for the game itself, yeah even at low, the GTX 970 is no good for it, for PC standards. It hits vram limits hard and the pcie 2.0 bus, ain't helping.
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For now I can't wait to test this on the 12400f+3060ti. And I think I will do three tests there, nvme pcie 4.0, sata ssd and a hard drive just for laughs. I will try to run it on the 7950 system as well. I think it is higher level than DX12_0 though, but I'll try anyway.
Thank you Square Enix for providing this demo. I wish more publishers provided demos for everything. I will actually buy it when it gets discounted, just for providing the demo.