Starfield is a “bizarrely worse experience” on Nvidia and Intel, says Digital Foundry
Starfield is a “bizarrely worse experience” on Nvidia and Intel, says Digital Foundry
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.
Indeed. "this would have the fewest bugs any Bethesda game ever shipped with." as said by MS.
Which is probably the platonic ideal of "damning with faint praise."
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...
That's like when you call your insurance company and get sent a survey, "Did we exceed your expectations?"
Well, my expectations were so low that actually speaking to a person means you exceeded them. So sure, I guess.
Don’t worry, there will be plenty bugs left for AMD users as well.
Yep, like the Sun not showing up
https://www.pcgamer.com/in-starfield-the-sun-literally-doesnt-shine-on-amd-gpu-users/
In this thread, people who understand very little about technology and how it works
Sounds like about 80% of Starfield discussion at the moment.
I mean it’s an Xbox game made with AMD.
Bizarre indeed
well really it's a PC game
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.
It's unexpected for nvidia users, who have grown used to games being optimised for them rather than AMD users.
This whole thing is just man bites dog news
Well, maybe. It's optimised for the Xbox which runs AMD hardware.
the Xbox releases optimized for Xbox the PC releases but optimized for PC.... with and :)
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've had a similar experience (and similar performance) on my all-AMD rig. There's slowdown in cities but nothing that makes the game unplayable.
Still, it should be optimized.
Still, it should be optimized.
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.
I'm in. 2070S and also don't experience what everybody is talking about.
3070ti, Ryzen 3900x - flawless experience with the settings maxed. FSR2 ran fine, but I have the DLSS mod now with the render scale at 80%.
It could also be something very specific about how they have their system configured.
Source: Work in tech support and it's astounding the number of programs and little settings that can break completely unrelated things on a 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 is? Am I doing something wrong? Because I get a solid 60-70 fps at all times on a 3070ti
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.
What CPU are you using? I've read it can be CPU heavy.
Not original dude but
I'm using an i7 11700k and a 1660 super and getting 60fps with occasional drops to 50.
My old i7-9700k is on ~50% on all 8 cores, my 3080Ti is on 100% and I get about 70-90fps.
My 3070 is at 99% utilization while my ryzen 5800 is at 27%
What are your settings?
At what resolution?
The game runs well on midnrange pcs, but it scales terribly as you move up the stack. It has the problem crysis had.
Noo you're not allowed to enjoy the game, the internet people said that Bethesda are terrible developers and the game runs like shit
lemmy guess, you are less than 8 hours in the game?
Little over 36 hours. Every setting on the highest it can go
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.
Running on a 2070.
I tried that and saw no difference unfortunately.
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...
Starfield doesn't even run on Arc GPUs.
Not surprising, game devs aren't really testing with Intel GPUs or working with Intel driver devs.
There will probably be a driver fix in a week or two though. Intel seem to be progressing fast.
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.
You mean to tell me that enabling ReBAR in the BIOS doesn't automatically enable it for every game?
Not for Nvidia. Nvidia maintain a whitelist in the driver. But not a blacklist
The BIOS setting enables the bus feature in hardware. But the driver also needs to support it.
force it to use resizable bar and get more fps
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.
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.
In my mind the 980ti is still only a couple years old, so I went to check.
I've been running it on my GTX 960. Looks piss poor, but I've been able to play without much issue.
Thank you so much for confirming it’s possible.
Ok maybe I will do a Wendy’s dual boot so I can try to play it. I love oblivion so much and I just want to play TES in space
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.
I Uninstaller graphics drivers on my boyfriends pc and reinstalled them manually to get that fixed. GeForce experience install wasn't working.
My 3080 is bottlenecks by my ancient CPU and it runs fine for me.
Jokes aside, the game runs great with the DLSS 3 FG mod installed.
What's stupid is that a 4090 gets similar FPS as a 7900XTX in this game without the mod. That's just plain sabotage.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Starfield is one of the most demanding games on PC that we’ve seen recently, with even the RTX 4090 paired with AMD’s latest Ryzen 7800X3D just about hitting 60fps on average at 4K with all the settings maxed out.
As reviewers and testers scramble to figure out why Starfield is so heavy, the experts over at Digital Foundry have discovered some obvious differences between AMD and Intel / Nvidia systems.
“If you’re on Intel and Nvidia you’re getting a bizarrely worse experience here in comparison to AMD GPUs in a way that’s completely out of the norm,” explains Alexander Battaglia in a detailed 32-minute tech analysis of Starfield on PC.
In my testing, I’ve found the RX 6800 XT can beat the RTX 3080 in a variety of games, but 46 percent is a far bigger margin than normal.
Starfield director Todd Howard was asked why Bethesda hadn’t optimized the game for PCs during a Bloomberg interview last week.
That answer hasn’t satisfied the many who are wondering why Starfield doesn’t play as well on their Nvidia and Intel systems, which account for the vast majority of PC gamers in Steam’s hardware survey.
The original article contains 630 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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"
A graphics card company ensuring software performs better on their GPU?
Time to switch to nvidia. They would never do such a thing.
LOL
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
Jesus, Nvidia has been doing cut throat shit like this for years.
Microsoft owns Bethesda. Microsoft owns Xbox.
Xbox uses AMD GPUs and CPUs.
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.
AMD has clearly had a hand in making sure this performs better on their GPUs
NVIDIA's entire business model is brand-exclusive proprietary software. Last I checked you can use FSR on NVIDIA but you can't use DLSS on AMD.
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.
brand-exclusive proprietary software
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.
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.
What would get Bethesda to deliberately favor AMD tech and hobble Nvidia?
From whom does Microsoft source the CPUs and GPUs for every single XBox?
Yep.
Xboxes run on AMD GPUS.
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.
Why is it bizarre they clearly put all their effort into making it run on the Xbox and that’s AMD hardware.
Because the author is bizarrely ignorant for something that's published. Oh wait, it's 2023. It's about click through, not accuracy. My b.