Starfield

LigTasm said:
All I know is if I open Radeon software in game, it crashes the driver every single time. I wanted to check my hotspot temps after I repasted because my newest 7900XTX was naturally running at 110C with a fan speed of 3400RPM because reasons, but no you cannot do that. Alt+R = crash.
Click to expand...
Did you try their stats overlay?
Alternatively, you could run HWinfo in the background.
Zarathustra[H] said:
If the memory bandwidth is really the limit here, Intel has a huge win in this game, what with AMD's infinity fabric holding Zen back.

Now I'm really curious if my 3960x can take advantage of the quad channel RAM bandwidth (and larger L3 cache) and make a better showing than other Zen2's here.

I mean, my quad channel DDR4-3600 - if the game can take advantage of it - has the same total bandwidth as DDR5-7200. The L3 cache of 128MB is also about 3.5x larger than the 36MB Smartcache on the i9-13900K, but is likely a bit slower than the new Intel Smartcache (I cant find AIDA64 cache numbers for the 3960x right now)
Click to expand...
Intel 13th gen also has increased L2 cache per core.
InaDaise said:
I read in an earlier post above that no one is in first person. Is that a problem that can simply get fixed with a dev patch? I'm a fan of first person view, it's so much more immersive to me because third person view blocks to much of the screen for me. So waiting to see what's going on with it.
Click to expand...
You can switch between 1st and 3rd person.
 
I think 5600Mhz is AM5's limit on the 1 to 1 to 1 as he says in that video, my 3700x would run DDR4 3600Mhz Cl 18 after bios updates on Window 11 with x470 chipset before I sold that cpu.
 
Last edited:
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never realized that in the past, but maybe that's because I have always been on HEDT platforms when playing Bethesda titles (first x79 i7-3930k, and now Threadripper 3960x). I guess Quad channel RAM helps mask some of these limitations.

Still, I do find it kind of hilarious that it seems to scale approximately with AIDA64 Memory Bandwidth benchmarks :p
Click to expand...

LigTasm said:
Be pretty cool to find out. Do you not have an early access copy? I got mine for free when I bought the 7000 series chip lol
Click to expand...

So, I went ahead and did it. Took me a while to get to the main city. (New Atlantis? Can't remember name). I had to do the intro mission, build a character, and such.

The conclusion thus far is that yes, the quad channel memory bandwidth and large L3 cache on the Threadripper 3960x DOES help, but it doesn't magically turn this 4 year old CPU into the latest and greatest either.

I set the graphics settings to ultra (just in case any of them added CPU load) and then turned down scaling to the lowest setting. This resulted in a GPU load in the 60's percent wise, to make sure I was CPU limited.

Walking around the city provides average framerates somewhere between 62 AND 65 fps A lighter scene in the city will get me about 75fps. Looking over the edge in the residential area for a view is where it really dropped down to ~47fps

Flying around in space, and the few introductory missions elsewhere gave me much higher framerates, 85-90fps most of the time, but it struck me that I never made sure I wasn't GPU limited there. I was running Ultra, but with FSR turned off, so chances are it would have gone higher had I scaled down the graphics.

Either way, I think the takehome here is that there is something to cache/memory bandwidth dependency in this game, as having more memory bandwidth and L3 cache does provide higher framerates, but it doesn't exactly provide i9-13900k framerates either, at some point once you provide it enough RAM bandwidth and cachce, the CPU cores themselves return to being the bottleneck.

I'd say that the memory bandwidth and large cache of the Threadripper 3960x increases performance equivalence from where one might expect it to be (Ryzen 7 3800x) to about the level of a Ryzen 7 5900X, judging by the combination of the previously posted Daniel Owen video and the benchmarks on the German link. So thanks to the large Cache and quad channel RAM it seems to perform a full generation faster than it otherwise would.

It's absolutely crazy how many cores this game will load up if you let it. I'm guessing the AI algorithm they use turns traditional threaded use in first/third person games on its head.

I just realized though, I didn't turn off SMT or set it in game mode or anything like that. I just ran it as is. I wonder if those settings might change anything.

Either way, main takeaway, if you have a relatively uncommon Threadripper 3960x it is totally playable. Not 100% perfect, with occasional dips down into the high 50's, but it's only in densely populated city areas where you aren't shooting or anything, so it isn't really the end of the world, at least if you have a G-Sync/Free-Sync/VRR solution (which in 2023, you really should)

So, was this little experiment worth the $100 cost? Probably not, but the curiosity was killing me. And I guess now I have a game to play.


EDIT:

I don't know why but rebooting, and reloading the game in the city, gave me an additional 2-3FPS average, so I'd say city average is now about 68 FPS.

I reloaded some of the introductory battles (trying to not introduce spoilers here) with graphics settings set to intentionally avoid GPU lmiits, wandering around planets without batttles ongoing results in about 95-100fps. As soon as the shooting starts, we are looking at about 85-90fps.


To add to the previous comment about how much this game loads up CPU threads, here is a screenshot taken a split second after alt tabbing from walking around the city at ~68FPS:

Starfield_Load.png


I count 24 threads with noteworthy load on them, 18 of those threads with over 50% load, 11 of them over 70%, and four of them occasionally hitting 100%.

I've never seen anything like this in a game before.
 
Last edited:
Zarathustra[H] said:
I just realized though, I didn't turn off SMT or set it in game mode or anything like that. I just ran it as is. I wonder if those settings might change anything.
Click to expand...
I'm really curious about that one myself ! Among other things, turning off SMT did seems to make a difference in some games with a 5950x.
 
Draver said:
I'm really curious about that one myself ! Among other things, turning off SMT did seems to make a difference in some games with a 5950x.
Click to expand...

I added some info above after you quoted. (but not about SMT)

I am going to test disabling SMT next. That had a HUGE impact on my TimeSpy scores, so it is not out of the question that it may have at least some impact here.

It's going to have to wait until a little later though, as the better half apparently needs me for something. Be back in a bit.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I added some info above after you quoted. (but not about SMT)

I am going to test disabling SMT next. That had a HUGE impact on my TimeSpy scores, so it is not out of the question that it may have at least some impact here.

It's going to have to wait until a little later though, as the better half apparently needs me for something. Be back in a bit.
Click to expand...
Alrighty ;)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I added some info above after you quoted. (but not about SMT)

I am going to test disabling SMT next. That had a HUGE impact on my TimeSpy scores, so it is not out of the question that it may have at least some impact here.

It's going to have to wait until a little later though, as the better half apparently needs me for something. Be back in a bit.
Click to expand...
This is why your [H]!
 
So I won't give anything away but I just ran across a random distress call that has turned into a multi part rescue quest that I've been working on for at least an hour. I still have more to do and so far it's been epic. It has a lot of fighting and the story behind is layered. It's in the middle of nowhere and involves multiple factions. Also in the process I ran across the freakiest fauna I've encountered so far. When I saw it I knew what was coming and it still freaked me out. Man this game is fun!
 
Does anyone know if you can change the difficulty after you start a game? I can't seem to figure out how to do it.

I started at "Hard" but I'm thinking I probably should have gone "Very Hard" as hard has been a little too easy.

I don't want to redo all the early stuff I just did though...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Does anyone know if you can change the difficulty after you start a game? I can't seem to figure out how to do it.

I started at "Hard" but I'm thinking I probably should have gone "Very Hard" as hard has been a little too easy.

I don't want to redo all the early stuff I just did though...
Click to expand...
Yes you can.
 
Draver said:
I'm really curious about that one myself ! Among other things, turning off SMT did seems to make a difference in some games with a 5950x.
Click to expand...
dub77nj said:
This is why your [H]!
Click to expand...

Alrighty

So going into this test, I thought improvements without SMT were in the realm of possibility, but that they'd maybe be marginal if any at all.

This turned out to not be the case.

In early battles, this netted me 10-15fps.

Now walking around the city I'm seeing average frame rates in the 72-75fps range, often hopping up into the 80's.

My 4 year old Threadripper is now better able to take advantage of its quad channel RAM and large L3 cache, and able to produce framerates above what one would expect from a 5800X3D, and more along the lines of a Ryzen 5 7600.

No idea if it will have similar benefits on other CPU's, but I'm guessing the benefit is bigger here because the game appears to not be able to use more than 24 threads. Because of this, taking my 24C/48T CPU down to 24C/24T doesn't really lose it anything.

Here is what it looks like with SMT off. Incredible that it puts a load on all those cores.

Starfield_Load_SMT_OFF.png



I'm glad I tried turning off SMT. I almost wasn't going to.

I WAS going to play at native resolution, but now that I have more CPU capability to play with I may turn on FSR or look into the DLSS mod.

Remind me, which is the DLSS mod that works well?

Edit: I found instructions here:

https://www.dexerto.com/tech/how-to-add-dlss-to-starfield-on-pc-step-by-step-mod-guide-2274531/
 
Last edited:
For me with HEDT CPU, turning off SMT is one of the first things I do.
 
I went down the rabbit hole of turning off SMT just recently. I was looking at maybe going to a 5800X3D or just staying with my 5900X. I'm sticking with the 5900X for now.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
I watched a little bit of this, but my DDR5 on this AM5 board is 6000 at CL30... am I going to get better performance than the benchmark he's pulling up, or is he saying that it doesn't matter because of the fabric stuff for AM5 CPUs?
Click to expand...

CL makes as close to no difference as possible on AM5. tRAS and tRC are way more important, along with bank refresh times. The problem he describes is Ryzen doesn’t take advantage of DDR5 having the ability to write without doing a full flush like previous memory types.
 
chameleoneel said:
And what is it?-----because it feels like a (good) game from 2010. With tons of mysterious CPU overhead. And even though it loads up tons of threads on CPUs with.tons of cores---they don't run the game any better than 6 and 8 core CPUs.
Click to expand...
IDK what does that mean. How is it a 2010 game? You have probably a thousand planets, where you can build outposts and have ongoing missions. Who cares that CPU usage is 70% during a dialogue? This seems like a non-issue to me. Optimization doesn't mean make everything as optimized as humanly possible, or the game would never get a release. The question is it optimized enough for mainstream consumption. I have a 4 year old mid range CPU and I did not see any CPU lag, so I'd say yes. As a gamer I don't care how high CPU usage is as long as it is not 100%. Let this be a problem for streamers who need the extra processing power for the stream itself.
 
LigTasm said:
CL makes as close to no difference as possible on AM5. tRAS and tRC are way more important, along with bank refresh times. The problem he describes is Ryzen doesn’t take advantage of DDR5 having the ability to write without doing a full flush like previous memory types.
Click to expand...
It makes no difference at all? They seem to have encountered a decent difference between stock CL30 and CL40 kits in this video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOatIQuQo3s
Of course they're running different games, and at 1080P, though. Are you talking about performance that is specific to Starfield? I guess sometime I could try running that Buildzoid timing set on my own Tridents.

This is what these run at stock XMP:
1693729485145.png


Mine is an M-die which as I understand it is kinda bad because they won't clock as high, but for half price I guess it's whatever.
 
M76 said:
IDK what does that mean. How is it a 2010 game? You have probably a thousand planets, where you can build outposts and have ongoing missions. Who cares that CPU usage is 70% during a dialogue? This seems like a non-issue to me. Optimization doesn't mean make everything as optimized as humanly possible, or the game would never get a release. The question is it optimized enough for mainstream consumption. I have a 4 year old mid range CPU and I did not see any CPU lag, so I'd say yes. As a gamer I don't care how high CPU usage is as long as it is not 100%. Let this be a problem for streamers who need the extra processing power for the stream itself.
Click to expand...

It does have a big universe, but graphics wise it really isn't as impressive as - say - Cyberpunk or other recent big titles, and it uses a shit ton of system resources for the privilege.

I'm only starting and it does seem like fun, but I can't help but wonder why a game that looks kind of dated is so resouce heavy.

If it turns out mining in the background while you play is Bethesda us new revenue stream, I am going to laugh my ass off. And ve outraged, but definitely laugh my ass off.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
It does have a big universe, but graphics wise it really isn't as impressive as - say - Cyberpunk or other recent big titles, and it uses a shit ton of system resources for the privilege.

I'm only starting and it does seem like fun, but I can't help but wonder why a game that looks kind of dated is so resouce heavy.

If it turns out mining in the background while you play is Bethesda us new revenue stream, I am going to laugh my ass off. And ve outraged, but definitely laugh my ass off.
Click to expand...
Because instead of wasting time making a new engine they basically have been making the game since 2016. I have 20 hours in so far and I have to say they made the right choice. IMO I prefer this game over cyberpunk.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
It makes no difference at all? They seem to have encountered a decent difference between stock CL30 and CL40 kits in this video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOatIQuQo3s
Of course they're running different games, and at 1080P, though. Are you talking about performance that is specific to Starfield? I guess sometime I could try running that Buildzoid timing set on my own Tridents.

This is what these run at stock XMP:
View attachment 595738

Mine is an M-die which as I understand it is kinda bad because they won't clock as high, but for half price I guess it's whatever.
Click to expand...


M die is great, it doesn’t clock as high but you can get really tight timings.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
It does have a big universe, but graphics wise it really isn't as impressive as - say - Cyberpunk or other recent big titles, and it uses a shit ton of system resources for the privilege.

I'm only starting and it does seem like fun, but I can't help but wonder why a game that looks kind of dated is so resouce heavy.

If it turns out mining in the background while you play is Bethesda us new revenue stream, I am going to laugh my ass off. And ve outraged, but definitely laugh my ass off.
Click to expand...
I honestly was positively surprised by the graphics, I expected much worse from Bethesda out of the box. It is not as impressive graphically as Cyberpunk, but not that far behind. And graphics are not the only thing that uses resources.

I don't get it why do we suddenly care about how much CPU time the game uses as long as it runs well? This is pure nitpicking.
 
M76 said:
I honestly was positively surprised by the graphics, I expected much worse from Bethesda out of the box. It is not as impressive graphically as Cyberpunk, but not that far behind. And graphics are not the only thing that uses resources.

I don't get it why do we suddenly care about how much CPU time the game uses as long as it runs well? This is pure nitpicking.
Click to expand...
Just got to the city.

To me it's really jarring how far behind Starfield is graphically. Loaded up games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, RDR2, Metro Exodus and even Horizon Zero Dawn. They all look vastly superior, in the total open world. Even with DLSS turned off and RT if possible the FPS in these games are still better than what Starfield can manage while looking like it's 5+ years older. Amazed they're also going to use this engine for TES6 in maybe 5+ years.

I'd be fine with the gfx if something like a 3070 got 60fps rock solid at 4k. But I'm on a 4090 seeing sub 60...think a 3070 would be lucky to get 30 on medium settings.
 
BeavermanA said:
Just got to the city.

To me it's really jarring how far behind Starfield is graphically. Loaded up games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, RDR2, Metro Exodus and even Horizon Zero Dawn. They all look vastly superior, in the total open world. Even with DLSS turned off and RT if possible the FPS in these games are still better than what Starfield can manage while looking like it's 5+ years older. Amazed they're also going to use this engine for TES6 in maybe 5+ years.

I'd be fine with the gfx if something like a 3070 got 60fps rock solid at 4k. But I'm on a 4090 seeing sub 60...think a 3070 would be lucky to get 30 on medium settings.
Click to expand...
IMO I think it’s perfectly fine given the immense scale of what they’ve made.
 
Starfield_05.jpgStarfield_04.jpg
Starfield_03.jpgStarfield_01.jpg
Starfield_02.jpg

Me2_04.jpgMe2_03.jpg
ME2_02.jpgMe2_01.jpg
*Not really, because these are from the 2021 remaster, and still. Do these look the same to anyone?

BeavermanA said:
Loaded up games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, RDR2, Metro Exodus and even Horizon Zero Dawn
Click to expand...
Did you really load up all those games? I remember HZD being exceptionally good looking for its age, but Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider not so much. Still none of these have the complexity to match even Skyrim, let alone Starfield.
 
I'm enjoying the game, only a few hours in BUT I HATE that you cant travel through space from planet to planet, you have to 'jump'.
Running all settings on Ultra or high, Razer 2023 laptop, 4080.
 
Last edited:
As you get farther into the game you will utilize the ship even less because fast travel becomes more available.
The only time you ever actually control the ship is when you spawn into orbit around a planet, but then you immediately open your map to land.

Sometimes a dynamic event will spawn in space when you load in, which gives you something to do for a few seconds.

Anyway 90% of the "Tech" tree is ship stuff, and thus basically useless. I regret taking Bounty Hunter background because the 2 ship skills are almost pointless.
Unless there's some crazy end-game space battles I don't see the point for all the huge ship upgrades.

Same goes for the ship builder, fun for the creative types but useless as a game mechanic.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
As you get farther into the game you will utilize the ship even less because fast travel becomes more available.
The only time you ever actually control the ship is when you spawn into orbit around a planet, but then you immediately open your map to land.

Sometimes a dynamic event will spawn in space when you load in, which gives you something to do for a few seconds.

Anyway 90% of the "Tech" tree is ship stuff, and thus basically useless. I regret taking Bounty Hunter background because the 2 ship skills are almost pointless.
Unless there's some crazy end-game space battles I don't see the point for all the huge ship upgrades.

Same goes for the ship builder, fun for the creative types but useless as a game mechanic.
Click to expand...
It's not as useless as you think, it just depends on what missions you're spending your time doing. But yes, generally, if you're only focusing on the story mission it's not a huge part of the game.
 
So... I recently finished THE EXPANSE on Prime and now crave a good space game. I've been watching STARFIELD for some time and due to its space flight portion not being fleshed out the way I'd like it to be I'm going to pass on it and get ELITE: Dangerous & Odyssey instead. I gave Star Citizen a try but it has issues so uninstalled it quickly.
 
TangledThornz said:
So... I recently finished THE EXPANSE on Prime and now crave a good space game. I've been watching STARFIELD for some time and due to its space flight portion not being fleshed out the way I'd like it to be I'm going to pass on it and get ELITE: Dangerous & Odyssey instead. I gave Star Citizen a try but it has issues so uninstalled it quickly.
Click to expand...
ED is a completely different type of game. You buy this game for the vast world of a Bethesda game and all the quests.

ED added a lot with the Horizons update and being able to build bases and what not, but it's just a completely different type of game. It has 'quests' but they aren't much more than Bethesda style radiant quests.

Also, people who haven't played ED before may not realize that the game has 'loading' screens as well just like this game. It's just that instead of a hard loading screen, when you're going down to the planet surface or going inside big stations it's a more 'smooth' transition. It's not like SC aims to be with an entire star system 100% loaded - Which is a complete pipe dream anyways given current technology.

I far prefer this game to ED, but some of that is that I played the shit out of ED years ago. Also - ED doesn't really have ship building / customization. There is basically just a set amount of static ships you choose from and you just change around weapons/upgrades.

Generally I would say NMS is closer to this game, but even NMS has limitations and doesn't offer the quests that this game does.

Once you play this game and you've played both ED/NMS you realize the hard loading screens are a complete non-issue, because as I stated, both those games still have 'loading' between worlds, etc.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
My 4 year old Threadripper is now better able to take advantage of its quad channel RAM and large L3 cache, and able to produce framerates above what one would expect from a 5800X3D, and more along the lines of a Ryzen 5 7600.

I'm glad I tried turning off SMT. I almost wasn't going to.
Click to expand...
Now that's interesting!! I'm really glad you went ahead and tried it out :)

I got a 5950X myself with SMT disabled and an all-core OC which significantly increase L3 cache memory bandwidth. I'm looking forward to see how much FPS I'll be able to pull with these tweaks.
 
Last edited:
Mchart said:
ED is a completely different type of game. You buy this game for the vast world of a Bethesda game and all the quests.
Click to expand...
I never played a Bethesda RPG game before so that probably influences my decision. Read good things about Fallout but it just never appealed to me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top