Starfield

Skott said:
Starfield pretty much graphically looks like Skyrim and FO4 in the game to me. It uses the very same game engine and graphic engines, although tweaked each time, so it makes sense it looks like it does. I remember when Skyrim came out people did complain about the graphics. They did the same with FO4. I call it a washed out look. Not sure if that's the proper term but its how I describe it...
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Bethesda released a 58 GB High Resolution Texture Pack for Fallout 4 which did improve things slightly and they also announced in October 2022 that a 4K next-gen update would be coming out this year...

https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-4-is-getting-a-free-4k-update-next-year/
 
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Skyrim at release looked incredible. I don't agree that it wasn't good looking. Was one of the best looking games when it came out (And still kind of is in many ways). It had low texture res issues, which was pretty typical for console games of the time, but it still looked amazing. The scale, amount of objects in a scene, and the nature scapes were amazing, and still are.

FO4 wasn't a massive improvement, but had some marginal improvements over Skyrim.

This game isn't a huge improvement. Some effects out of the box have been cranked up, but it fundamentally doesn't look much different over FO4.
 
Game Director Todd Howard revealed that the official Starfield modding tools will be released sometime in 2024...both Skyrim and Fallout 4 received High Resolution Texture Packs so one is probably coming for Starfield as well but not anytime soon
 
polonyc2 said:
Game Director Todd Howard revealed that the official Starfield modding tools will be released sometime in 2024...both Skyrim and Fallout 4 received High Resolution Texture Packs so one is probably coming for Starfield as well but not anytime soon
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IMO texture resolution generally isn't the issue with the graphics this time around unlike the prior games on PC. It will help some, and it's pretty obvious the game isn't make use of higher-end amounts of VRAM. (I only see maybe around 8GB used on a 4080 at 1440)

The major issue here is just the general quality of a lot of models/objects are somewhat lower poly than you'd expect for a 2023 title, and re-doing static meshes takes a lot of time/energy by modders. Not as easy as just doing higher res textures w/ AI work, etc.
 
This took me a full hour of landing over and over.
2 biomes both with their exotic resource (Xenon and Plutonium).

Starfield_biomeresources.png


starfield_biome.png
 
Mchart said:
IMO texture resolution generally isn't the issue with the graphics this time around unlike the prior games on PC. It will help some, and it's pretty obvious the game isn't make use of higher-end amounts of VRAM. (I only see maybe around 8GB used on a 4080 at 1440)

The major issue here is just the general quality of a lot of models/objects are somewhat lower poly than you'd expect for a 2023 title, and re-doing static meshes takes a lot of time/energy by modders. Not as easy as just doing higher res textures w/ AI work, etc.
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And from what I've read, it runs like doo doo? I have a 6700xt, and the reviews at 1440 make it sound like it's a slide show.
 
Modred189 said:
And from what I've read, it runs like doo doo? I have a 6700xt, and the reviews at 1440 make it sound like it's a slide show.
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At 1440p with the "high" preset I was seeing 60-65fps on a 6700XT across a variety of CPUs. With some tuning of the settings you can easily be in the 70s. Some of the options show little to no graphical change for a big performance hit.
 
Mchart said:
IMO texture resolution generally isn't the issue with the graphics this time around unlike the prior games on PC. It will help some, and it's pretty obvious the game isn't make use of higher-end amounts of VRAM. (I only see maybe around 8GB used on a 4080 at 1440)

The major issue here is just the general quality of a lot of models/objects are somewhat lower poly than you'd expect for a 2023 title, and re-doing static meshes takes a lot of time/energy by modders. Not as easy as just doing higher res textures w/ AI work, etc.
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I wonder if it has to do with the somewhat flat global lighting in the Creation Engine and the default color "filters".
Interiors look absolutely incredible in this game, but large parts of exteriors like New Atlantis just look... flat and ~10 years old.
Up close the textures aren't even low-res so I can't quite explain what besides lighting/blending it might be?
 
schoolslave said:
I wonder if it has to do with the somewhat flat global lighting in the Creation Engine and the default color "filters".
Interiors look absolutely incredible in this game, but large parts of exteriors like New Atlantis just look... flat and ~10 years old.
Up close the textures aren't even low-res so I can't quite explain what besides lighting/blending it might be?
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I do wonder how much slapping on raytraced GI would help this game in certain areas.
 
I'm having a lot of fun with this game but it does majorly suck that there aren't any areas to just 'explore'. My favorite thing to do in FO is just get out into the wasteland; explore, pillage, and plunder.. There's none of that here, it's just constant questing, most of which are actually pretty good, but some, like the Ryujin stuff, are absolute chores.
 
w35t said:
I'm having a lot of fun with this game but it does majorly suck that there aren't any areas to just 'explore'. My favorite thing to do in FO is just get out into the wasteland; explore, pillage, and plunder.. There's none of that here, it's just constant questing, most of which are actually pretty good, but some, like the Ryujin stuff, are absolute chores.
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I mentioned last week this game's length is entirely dependant on how long quests last. Or at least, meaningful quests.
Once those run out what is left? Making ships, building outposts.

We will have to wait and see if the game has enough content to last 500+ or even 1000+ hours like previous games.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
I mentioned last week this game's length is entirely dependant on how long quests last. Or at least, meaningful quests.
Once those run out what is left? Making ships, building outposts.

We will have to wait and see if the game has enough content to last 500+ or even 1000+ hours like previous games.
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There are plenty of systems that have no quests attached, but yet still have unique POI's. I think if you looked at it by unique POI's this game has the same if not more compared to before. Yes, you don't have as much time sink because you aren't having to run place to place, but the content is still there.

And TBH - I do find this game easier for me to sink time into unlike Skyrim/FO3/4 where I constantly have to quit out because something with the game will break as i'm running from destination to destination. I find it pretty annoying in the prior games how shit would just break because of random spawns killing other stuff, etc. Of course I do understand that some other people like the chaos of the prior games.
 
LigTasm said:
This is a bug, I've seen people with all sorts of cards reporting it. Unfortunately I haven't seen a solution other than "update drivers".
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I have a 3080ti and the game runs just fine, the drivers are the latest version.
 
They keep adding quests. I don’t even know wtf I am doing. I came on mars but now have to go to Venus. But I am not done yet. Wtf?
 
Just played the first couple of hours of the game. Pretty awesome! The scale is impressive. I don't usually care a great deal for Inon Zur's music but this soundtrack is great, reminds me of a mixture between Star Trek & Interstellar.
 
About 25 hours in. Went through at least a couple cycles of not liking the game, then loving it, and back again.

After a few minor tweaks, mods and adjusting my TV settings, this game does look pretty good now most of the time. There's a lot of other things either visually(not graphics quality) or game mechanics breaking my immersion that I wish they'd focused on instead of the endless content.

Spent a lot of time doing stuff like surveying, researching, resources, outpost stuff etc. which I honestly don't care for. Thought it would be needed for $, gear, ships and upgrades for some reason. Stopped doing that crap, and greatly increased my enjoyment. Getting plenty of money just stealing/looting everything valuable in sight, which is my style.
 
Ranulfo said:
Starfield has an I/O problem that is holding back the rest of the PC supposedly.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbaYeiAr_30
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This is interesting.

I generally tend to measure SSD's by how well they do low queue depth, 4K random reads.

Samsung NVMe drives tend to do a good chunk better than other drives in this regard.

The absolute best are Intel's Optane drives, despite being Gen3, but they are no longer made.

It would be interesting to load up a build with LOTS of RAM and run the game in a ramdisk.
 
I have played this on both windows and linux. Linux does not seem to have the I/O problem, but the frame rate is lower.

when I say this, it is just by visual observation, linux seems much smoother even with a lower frame rate.
 
Okkkk.... Finally fired up the game today and just landed on New Atlantis.

(Like many posters here, I had no idea what I was doing for the most part: went with Soldier class & the following traits - Extrovert, Hero Worshipped, and Raised Enlightened)

- The UI is a confusing mess ATM, as is the whole ship system balancing crap but I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually or YT will inform me proper heh

On the bright side, I'm able to stay above 30 FPS consistently on the Medium Preset/1080p/w FSR2 set to "Quality/67%". So that's definitely better than anticipated :)

Upon exiting my ship on New Atlantis, fps was at 43. I'll take it.
 
i bought and havent played it yet. Going to give it a shot with my handheld PC tonight.
 
horrorshow said:
Okkkk.... Finally fired up the game today and just landed on New Atlantis.

(Like many posters here, I had no idea what I was doing for the most part: went with Soldier class & the following traits - Extrovert, Hero Worshipped, and Raised Enlightened)

- The UI is a confusing mess ATM, as is the whole ship system balancing crap but I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually or YT will inform me proper heh

On the bright side, I'm able to stay above 30 FPS consistently on the Medium Preset/1080p/w FSR2 set to "Quality/67%". So that's definitely better than anticipated :)

Upon exiting my ship on New Atlantis, fps was at 43. I'll take it.
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You sonuvabitch, I got you the early access version, what's taken you so long!
 
Spent 100k upgrading all my ship guns and now I do even less damage.
I'm just gonna have to enable ship cheats, it's impeding my ability to play the game. I think the problem is I gained 15 levels from scanning all the planets in the game, now my gear is way behind and I don't have any points in ship skills :|
 
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Crazy how much worse it runs on Intel and Nvidia hardware. This is exactly why sponsorships are fucking cancer.
 
This is what it looks like mining every resource in the game.
I'm only missing uniques, but they only exist on 1 planet each so you can't efficiently ship them. Whole process took about 30 hours which includes the learning curve lol.

Starfield_OutpostM.png

Starfield_Mining.png
 
w35t said:
I'm having a lot of fun with this game but it does majorly suck that there aren't any areas to just 'explore'. My favorite thing to do in FO is just get out into the wasteland; explore, pillage, and plunder.. There's none of that here, it's just constant questing, most of which are actually pretty good, but some, like the Ryujin stuff, are absolute chores.
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This is it… exploration is just absent in this game. I would much rather have one big open world, rather than all these tiny places in the middle of nowhere.

Massively disappointing for me personally.
 
Review comments from a blogger:

https://hole-in-my-head.blogspot.com/2023/09/starfield-performance-analysis.html?m=1

Todd Howard may have been a little insensitive in the way he phrased his answer to that question posed to him in the introduction to this blogpost, but he also isn't wrong, either. A PC with an AMD R5 5500/R5 5600, 16 GB DDR4, a cheap 1 TB SSD and an ~RTX 3070-equivalent card (e.g. an RX 7600 or RX 6700) will let you play at 60 fps at 1080p or at a higher resolution with upscaling.


Optimized Settings...​

changing quality settings really does have a good performance uplift in this game and, at least at native resolution without VRS or upscaling /dynamic resolution, we do not really see that much of a visual degradation for pushing these settings down a couple of notches.

Doing this takes the RTX 3070 from ~40 fps average at Ultra/High settings to ~60 fps average at all medium settings at 1080p and I feel like this is a very playable framerate. As a result, like many other outlets have done, I've come up with some quality settings of my own which I find do not negatively affect the performance from "all medium" quality settings but will enable a slightly better looking game.
Optimised settings.png



Performance Bottlenecks...​

The way that the game is designed to load the data from the disk happens in relatively large batches, resulting in large frametime spikes*, causing dips and drops in measured average fps when this loading occurs. Unfortunately, as per my informal testing, it does not appear that this can be mitigated through faster storage, RAM or CPU (though I only have the two SKUs to test on)...

In this sense, the person benchmarking this title needs to ensure that they are not crossing boundaries which result in streaming of data from the storage as this will negatively effect the benchmark result and, in effect, means that the benchmark is actually just testing the game engine's streaming solution rather than the CPU and GPU performance.

This is not something I've seen mentioned in any technical review of the game and it potentially calls into question some of the results we've seen thrown around the internet because these performance dips due to loading are not consistent between runs.


Potential Bugs...​

One thing I did want to test was the claim that Hardware Unboxed's claim* that Ultra shadow settings negatively impact performance on Nvidia's cards moreso than AMD's cards.
*I wasn't able to find it in their bazillion videos they have put out addressing Starfield so can't link it...
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Effect_ShadowQ.png

After my testing, I can confirm this claim - I saw the average fps increase by around 30% for both Nvidia cards when reducing this setting from Ultra to High whereas I only saw a 12% increase for the AMD card. Additionally, the minimum fps increased by 50 - 60% on the Nvidia cards but only around 15% on the AMD card.

To me, this is clearly a manifestation of a potential driver problem, as opposed to the game itself - i.e. the way the Nvidia driver handles this setting is broken. As such, it is not worth keeping at Ultra when using Nvidia hardware
 
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