If anyone wasn’t aware, there is a mod to replace FSR2 with DLSS and it is INCREDIBLE for performance if your system supports it. I went from all minimum with 40-50fps to well over my 144 target on medium (indoors) and running okay (60 with some drops) in tough scenes outdoors.
I’m just confused because I have an i9 9900k and a 4070ti, neither are even remotely close to being worked hard and yet I can’t break 50fps. Like half vram usage and maybe 10% CPU/GPU usage. I thought I had it running smoothly, but it’s a smooth 30fps…
Finally took the time to check my performance. I’ve got a 3070ti and a Ryzen 9 3900x, CPU is at ~55% utilization and GPU is ~95% at maybe 40 fps average. That’s at ultra on all settings, with the DLSS mod and a render scale of 80%.
Have the recent driver & game updates helped at all?
I’m an idiot and for the entire year I’ve had my 4k monitor I never enabled the setting on the monitor that allowed it to run at 60hz so I was always locked at 30fps with vsync…
I couldn’t say if the recent update helped as I just discovered this new level of my idiocy yesterday lol
You can force it to use resizable bar and get more fps. It just needs to be enabled and it’s such an easy thing for the Bethesda devs to do, yet people need Nvidia profile inspector to enable it. For no reason.
If this is true, it means the game is designed around a UMA architecture, i.e. xbox. Nobody in their right mind tries to map more than 256MB of CPU memory concurrently for a single frame. Either that or the engine is completely shit at resource streaming (also characteristic of console-first games), and so is relying on the OS to demand-page random resources as needed.
I want to know how the hell I am lucky enough to not have any real performance or graphical issues…
I’m not even using a supported GPU (1660 Super) and it’s still very playable with the lowest fps being 27 and the highest being about 70.
Outside is on the low end. Interiors are higher, with empty interiors (IE no NPCs) being the fastest. Just dropping a single NPC into a space I am getting 72 fps in drops the frame rate to 50. NPCs aren’t handled by the GPU; they are CPU bound.
My CPU is a Ryzen 5 3600x; the exact AMD chip Bethesda lists as the recommended. In fact, other than my GPU, the rest of my system meets recommended requirements.
Edit: I kinda wonder if it’s simply how things are tested in QA. For years, I see users claiming to have high end systems having tons of problems across various games, and I am starting to think if they aren’t simply lying about their specs (which seems an odd thing to do if you want real support), is that they are simply too new and the focus was more on hardware more users use. Going by Steam hardware survey stats, most people have pretty old stuff while only a small fraction are on super high end systems.
Yeah, I second that. I run the game to a perfectly playable extent, low-to-medium settings, and I have a barely better GPU, 1660-Ti, with a 10th gen laptop i7
I can’t argue there. Considering how well it runs as it is on this card, it feels like their minimum requirements are way off, and they could have supported some older hardware if they optimized certain systems a little more. I don’t want to make it sound like no effort was taken at all, because… Damn. I’ve seen every release from Morrowind to Starfield as it was at launch, and this is by far the most well built right out of the gate.
Bruh you joke but literally I’ve had to tell people to plug their monitor into their graphics card instead of the MB before, including pulling up pictures of what a graphics card looks like in the back of the computer.
Hell, my rig doesn't even meet minimum specs (Ryzen 5 2600 and a RX 570) and other than periodic CTDs (fuck Akila City, that was like every 5 min) its run like a dream.
It’s not bizarre, as others have pointed out AMD has clearly had a hand in making sure this performs better on their GPUs. One instance could be a coincidence but when you’ve got multiple instances of things being ‘missing’, ‘not optimised properly’ etc for RTX cards, you have to wonder whether it’s a bunch of coincidences or deliberate.
This has taken a lot of shine off AMD for me. They seem to be employing a Russia-esque strategy of “If I can’t improve myself then I guess I’d better make things suck for other people so I don’t seem as bad”
But to be fair, nVidia has also been pumping massive amounts of $$$ into R&D in both the Graphics and AI space.
They need return on their R&D investment somehow.
And it's not like they are cutting AMD out of the AI enhanced stuff.
They just aren't going to spend $$$ and effort to help AMD implement their solutions, and AMD doesn't have the hardware to run the AI functions properly.
AMD can implement RTX if they wanted to, nVidia's research papers are out there.
But they can't because they don't have the knowledge of how to implement it.
And it isn't like AMD is sharing with Intel any of their R&D work they do on the CPU side.
DLSS doesn't run on older nVidia hardware either as it's designed to utilize the raytracing and tensor cores of the RTX series. I recall reading somewhere that while it could technically be made to run without them, without the specific cores optimized to do the calculations required it would run terribly. Then again it might just be a blatant lie ¯_(ツ)_/¯
FSR on the other hand is designed to run on standard GPU hardware and seeing as the tech is open source they can't exactly hide any code that would break compatibility with nVidia.
That's a pretty bold conspiracy theory. Nvidia outsells AMD by a pretty huge margin. As does Intel in CPUs. What would get Bethesda to deliberately favor AMD tech and hobble Nvidia? That would merely give them a LOT of negative press, as we are seeing now.
The idea of bribery is right out because Bethesda is owned by MS. The idea of laziness is also not great because as above, there's more Intel/Nvidia users so it'd be easier to only prioritize one set of hardware, the most common, if laziness was the goal.
Most likely it's as someone below said: this game was primarily designed around console performance. Both of which, the Xbox and PS5, use AMD hardware. And Bethesda is either too inept or too time-constricted to get it to run well on the primary PC hardware. This is, pretty damn common in the games industry: allowing PC performance to flounder because they are a smaller set of sales.
But MS has no incentive for Nvidia cards to not work well because 99% of PC users are Windows users and most likely run this on Gamepass, an MS product.
Also because you can always lower settings or throw better hardware at the problem on PC so even a badly optimized port should eventually run acceptably. But if you fuck it up on console, you get Cyberpunk on the PS4 and have to spend a ridiculous amount of time and money to make it work.
And this is Bethesda we are talking about, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if the PC versions are designed from the get got under the expectation that the modding scene will come to the rescue and fix everything for them no matter how terrible their work is.
Feel like this isn't the best take. AMD working with Bethesda to make sure the game works on their card doesn't come close to implying they made sure it didn't work on Nvidia cards. Nvidia should've been working to make sure the game ran well on their cards too.
Nvidia has been pulling the tricks you're talking about for years now, though
So the game being optimised for AMD makes absolute sense for Microsoft.
AMD paying for access to optimise for thier PC CPUs and GPUs makes sense for AMD.
However not optimising the game for Intel and Nvidia does not make sense for Microsoft. This is more likely to be an oversight/typical poor AAA game launch than deliberate play to benefit AMD. Other games like Cyberpunk 2077 for example had problems on CPUs/GPUs, we have selection biase here where there are fewer problems on AMD systems, and also a generally reasonably solid launch.
Its frustrating but most of the issues are optimisation, not game breaking. The experience on Intel/Nvidia systems is good, just not as good as it could be. One of the examples in the article was a framerate of 95 FPS vs 105 FPS - that may have been avoidable, but it's a minor annoyance at best. Some of this (not all but some) is just obsessing over minutia and things that won't affect the player experience.
So basically storm in a tea cup, and much of this the usual post launch technical difficulties that will be optimised with patches. This is why people shouldn't buy games at launch, although so far at least we haven't seen the game breaking bugs that have dogged other AAA titles at launch.
Nvidia does this all the time. If anything, I’d like to see more games focused on AMD graphics, it’s a tactic that AMD as a company has been getting whomped by.
Ideally, though, there would be better support for all graphics platforms, though.
I don’t think it’s deliberate, per se, but Bethesda was clear about who they were partnering with, long ago. If a graphics company is trying to help you optimize for their platform, they aren’t going to be stressing abouy the impact on their competitors.
From what I recall from one of their Directs, Digital Foundry corroborated another outlet’s finding that ultra settings (and I think specifically ultra shadows) are unoptimized. Tons of weird frame time jittering, and like a 15% drop in FPS compared to AMD. So, if you have shadows turned to High or lower, that’ll explain it. Otherwise, what they’re saying is an AMD equivalent would be getting 70-80 fps in your case.
My 6650 XT isn't quite the same but I can't even get those framerates with low to medium settings. lol
It's more like 40-75 FPS depending on the location.
It’s not even a close comparison, Nintendo games look like ass because they have a max resolution of 1600x900 and 30fps, add in the texture resolution of things in game as well and it’s obvious why PC games often run “worse” also… They have one console they release on instead of the literally millions of possible different PC configurations
It’s not even a close comparison, Nintendo games look like ass because they have a max resolution of 1600x900 and 30fps, add in the texture resolution of things in game as well and it’s obvious why PC games often run “worse” also…
Did you account for the fact that Nintendo was developing for massively underpowered handheld hardware? And not significantly more powerful Xbox Series consoles? And actually made their games to fit the strengths and limitations of their target hardware?
They have one console they release on instead of the literally millions of possible different PC configurations.
You would have a point...if Starfield ran with decent performance on even the Xbox Series X. You know, the target platform?
...the fact that it has to run at 30fps on powerful hardware despite having nothing to show for it?
To put it another way, how the fuck is it not targeting 60 on the Series X? I could understand it for the Series S, but there is little to no fidelity improvements on show like they said there'd be.
It is definitely prettier then Witcher 3 lmfao, Cyberpunk is probably prettier however it also ran like shit for everyone and was infamously bad at launch lmfao.
I dunno dude, the next gen patch for Witcher 3 is absolutely gorgeous. Maybe there's less opportunity for the game to show off reflections but damn it look pretty. Kinda hard to compare though as they are going for totally different graphical styles.
I'll give you that Cyberpunk was an absolute mess at launch. It made typical Bethesda jank look muuuuuch preferable by comparison. Perhaps it would be more fair to wait for Bethesda to release a few patches before comparing?
I can show some of my in game screenshots from Starfield if you’d like, I just want people to actually try the game for themselves for a few hours instead of buying into internet rage bandwagon.
It’s a great game with tons of quests and things to do with minimal game breaking bugs to worry about.
I do have one friend who could never really get into Skyrim/Fallout but he took the plunge into Starfield and has far exceeded my playtime already and loving it, for what it’s worth.
The XSX isn't running full fat Windows in the background for one thing, which adds overhead, for another XSX games can be optimised for the hardware at a level that isn't feasible for equivalent generic PC hardware.
Despite that, the XSX still can't run it at 60, how was generic PC hardware going to fare any better?
Kept getting “your gpu is too old” error messages, although I know others have played it online with 980ti. All the google results said to update windows but I wasn’t even on windows. Gave up on it.
Yeah but they say you can run it on a 1070 and that’s basically the same lvl as 980ti
Anyways I saw 980ti benchmarks out there so i don’t think that’s the problem, it’s some dx12 compatibility nonsense. Which shouldn’t be an issue because it supposedly runs on steam deck.
It would be a factor when trying to use a recent Mac, they don't have x86 processors.
x86 processors are the default architecture for literally every other PC manufacturer, as well as PC games, which is why you wouldn't normally pull it into question.
I get the same error on the same hardware. Luckily, I have a steam deck I can play it on while the issue (hopefully) gets resolved in Proton. It doesn’t run very well on the steam deck, though. But it is playable.
AMD being a “partner” is business speak for “AMD paid us a bunch of money because having their brand on our product is a much larger advertising reach than they can accomplish on their own”.
That performance is better on AMD is in no way “bizarre”… it’s exactly what would be expected.
Don’t worry though, Todd Howard himself said that Bethesda definitely did a lot of work on optimizing Starfield. This is all still the fault of the end users, who just need to “upgrade their hardware.” Just ignore the decrepit Gamebryo engine that still has all the same old bugs and quirks that it’s had for nearly two decades.
Unreal engine 5 is just Unreal engine 1 with yet another new coat of paint, what's your point?
Just because the initial release date of an engine is decades old, doesn't mean the actual engine is. Game engines get updated and fitted with new features and capabilities on top of what's there already, Devs don't waste time rewriting the engines from scratch on each new version.
The issue with Gamebryo is more that key bugs are just not getting fixed. How long have NPCs walked away mid-conversation? How long has enemy AI just found itself stuck without taking actions. How long have companions been getting stuck in doors and blocking your path?
The frustrating part isn’t that they’re reusing the same engine. It’s that they’re endlessly tacking on more shiny baubles, without ever fixing issues that have been present across all of their games. Hell the newest bauble they added, the new facial animations, are already breaking down in bizarre ways.
At this point, it feels like there’s so much technical debt from half-implemented features that starting from scratch or licensing an engine from someone else might be the best route forward.
I mean, to their credit, the game is relatively bug-free. Still a few oddities here and there and AI that probably needs a tweak or two, but otherwise it’s been stable for me and I’ve not soft locked myself out of major quests…yet…
Out of curiosity, what were your two issues? The only one I've experienced is groundpounder (side quest) locking in a couple spots. Other than that and CTDs (because I'm under minspec), it's been basically big free for me too.
The AI is straight broken. Combat isn't a challenge because enemies get stuck in ladders, hide behind 2' chairs, and last night I found the last enemy sitting down staring off into space.
Then we get all the dialogue bugs. Invisible companions, people talking to you walking away, facing wrong directions, whatever is happening is facial expressions.
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