AMD’s venerable Polaris architecture graphics cards are showing their age, with one of the hottest new titles simply refusing to run. The PC game on everyone’s lips in January 2023, Forspoken, has DirectX 12 feature-level 12_1 API requirements that the stoic Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 series graphics cards can’t satisfy.

That the aging AMD Polaris graphics cards have finally started to be too old to party like they used to was highlighted by Redditor xCurio. They contrasted the inability of Polaris to run the PC game du jour, Forspoken, when the even older GeForce GTX 960 or GTX 970 cards (Maxwell architecture) can be used.

If we check out the published minimum system requirements for Forspoken, it can be seen that gamers are expected to use a system with at least an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB in the graphics card section or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. These are RDNA 1 and Pascal architecture graphics cards, respectively. Despite the clear minimum recommendation for an RDNA 1 or better GPU, it is still a surprise that the older Polaris isn’t even able to run Forspoken.

AMD released a new Adrenalin graphics driver with optimizations ready to support Forspoken just a couple of days ago, but this driver is for use with its Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 3) graphics cards only. Curiously, the red team hasn’t provided any driver updates for earlier Radeon RX series GPUs since  December 8, while the RX 7000 series have received four driver updates since that time. So if you have a Vega, RDNA 1 or RDNA 2 architecture graphics card, we hope Forspoken won’t be an unpleasant experience due to technical issues. We’re also hopeful that AMD has a new Adrenalin graphics driver complete or almost ready in the pipeline for pre-RDNA 3 architecture graphics card owners.

In the meantime, Forspoken isn’t receiving the warmest reception from gamers. For example, if you check the Steam user reviews section, many recommend holding off for a few weeks or months until patches have ironed out the launch wrinkles. Another benefit of this strategy is that it could also receive a price cut. Pleasingly, there is a free demo to try if you are curious about this epic action RPG adventure game.