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Best Forspoken settings for performance on PC

Applying the best Forspoken settings makes navigating the world of Athia a smoother and more beautiful experience, letting the fantasy open-world game shine.

Best Forspoken settings: Alfre converses with her friend (off-screen)

Finding the best Forspoken settings for your system can be a troublesome task, as the fantasy game demands a lot from your rig. However, this unfortunately says more about the quality of this PC port than it does about the level of visual fidelity you can expect to see.

If you haven’t heard, the Forspoken system requirements are surprisingly heavy. The recommended specs list includes some hardware that many modest machines will struggle to meet, such as 24GB of RAM. Meanwhile, developer Luminous Productions reckons you’ll need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 to hit 60fps and run the game at a 4K resolution.

Our test rig’s GPU, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, has enough pixel pushing power to get Forspoken running at a playable frame rate, but the best Forspoken settings will help you boost fps regardless of what pixel pusher you’re packing.

PCGamesN test rig: MSI MPG Trident AS 11th gaming PC, featuring an Intel Core i7 11700F, MSI Ventus Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, 32GB of DDR4 3,200MHz RAM, MSI B560 motherboard, and Windows 11.

Best Forspoken settings: Alfre attacks a large silver lizard with her signature parkour styled moveset

Best Forspoken presets

The best Forspoken preset for most people will be ‘High’, as the majority of its settings aren’t too far from our own custom preset. It’s also the lowest option that doesn’t automatically trigger some form of upscaling technology, be it AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 or Nvidia DLSS, depending on your graphics card.

Moving up to ‘Ultra-High’ can be accomplished on a midrange GPU like the RTX 3070, but the minor visual improvements it offers simply aren’t worth the effect it has on your average frame rate. While this preset is only really for those with the best graphics card models, some of its niceties can still be enjoyed without much of a performance hit, such as Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion, as we’ll touch on later.

The ‘Standard’ preset could be a godsend if you have an older pixel pusher, knocking the reflections and ambient occlusion settings down a peg. Just bear in mind that it does automatically engage upscaling, which will help boost fps but will affect image quality (particularly at lower resolutions such as 1080p).

Finally, we suggest outright avoiding ‘Low’ if it can be helped. The main reason for this, again, is because of the use of upscaling, which is aggressively set to the most performance oriented setting, image quality be damned. Furthermore, there are only a handful of settings that actually hamper your frame rate to a noticeable degree, meaning you’re unnecessarily cutting back on objectively better graphics.

Best Forspoken settings: The protagonist of the game, Frey, wields an orb of white magic light

Best Forspoken settings

Here are the best Forspoken settings:

  • Variable rate shading (VRS): Off
  • Dynamic resolution: Off
  • Model memory: High
  • Texture memory: High
  • AMD FSR 2 / Nvidia DLSS: Quality
  • Sharpness: 0.80
  • Render resolution: 100%
  • Model detail level: High
  • Texture filtering: High
  • Reflections: Standard
  • Motion blur: Off
  • Depth of field: Off
  • Fog quality: Standard
  • Cloud quality: High
  • Shadow quality: Standard
  • Ray traced shadows: Off
  • Ambient occlusion: High
  • Ray traced ambient occlusion: Off
  • Anti-aliasing: Temporal AA

Best Forspoken settings: Alfre gllides across the open world of Athia

Shadow Quality

Shadow quality in Forspoken carries a significant performance footprint. This is often the case in open-world games, thanks to their expansive environments that are littered with many dynamic and static objects that each cast their own shadows. Switching from ‘High’ to ‘Low’ alleviates potential bottlenecks by as much as 17%, but we’d recommend sticking with ‘Standard’ for a balance of better visuals and higher fps.

Fog Quality

If you’re struggling to hit your frame rate target, dropping the fog quality can be a massive help in some areas. Improvements of up to 14% do sound nice when using the ‘Low’ preset, but lowering this setting does have a more noticeable visual impact, which is why we suggest sticking with ‘Standard’ here.

Ray Traced Shadows

Ray traced shadows is one of two ray tracing settings that Forspoken offers, and it’s one you should probably skip. You’ll be hard-pressed to notice any massive differences with them turned on, and leaving them by the wayside can net you an addition 10% more frames.

Depth of Field

Many gamers automatically opt to not use depth of field, as it’s generally a preferential setting. However, it has a surprisingly large effect on performance, to the tune of 8%. This is perhaps the easiest trade off to make of all the Forspoken settings tweaks you can make.