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Starfield PC - Digital Foundry Tech Review - Best Settings, Xbox Series X Comparisons + More

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
Did someone ask for another Starfield thread?



adamsapple adamsapple isn't feeling well today so I'm replacing him.

- Missing basic features such as DLSS, FOV sliders, gamma and contrast adjustment, and HDR
- Says it's great that modders added that but also blames Bethesda for being such a huge studio with a massive budget that doesn't have those features
- DLSS is much better than FSR. Less ghosting, less flickering, and an overall more stable image
- AF looks poor at times and forcing it through the NVIDIA control panel results in weird shadow glitches. Cannot recommend forcing it
- AMD GPUs run MUCH better than Intel/NVIDIA GPUs, outperforming their counterparts by up to 40%. The 6800 XT for instance consistently outperforms the 3080 by over 25%
- Ultra Shadows also cause significant stutters on NVIDIA/Intel cards
- Similar story with CPUs but not in terms of performance. Hyperthreading seems to be broken on Intel where it results in WORSE performance compared to no Hyperthreading. SMT doesn't exhibit such behavior
- No shader compilation stutters but it does have stutters when crossing invisible lines in the game world. They can be mitigated with more powerful hardware than can halve the frame time spikes
- Very light on VRAM usage, using less than 4GB at 1440p/optimized settings
- PC is the best way to play it by far, provided you're willing to circumvent the inherent limitations
- Very long load times on Series X, 37 seconds from the main menu into game whereas on a PC with a 12900K and NVME drive, it takes less than 11 seconds, suggesting there is no usage of Direct Storage
- Recommends people with older NVIDIA cards (3070 and below) to wait for more patches/driver updates

b0vv5j.png
 
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Xcell Miguel

Gold Member
Forcing anisotropic to 16x only causes shadow issue if shaders are already compiled, you just need to delete them and there will be no shadow issue.
I force it globally in the drivers since forever and never saw that issue in Starfield.

Also no mention of forcing ReBAR on Nvidia cards, which could lower the performance difference against equivalent AMD cards, the Game Ready Nvidia driver was not that ready in the end.
 

Bojji

Gold Member
More than being a next-generation only game it is a game that ran like shit on old generation HW so it got cut… other platforms are bruteforcing it…

Probably, this is what should happen to cyberpunk at launch, it was disaster on kast gen.

Didn't expect PC load times to be that much faster than Series X you'd think they would use the Velocity Architecture/direct storage

Many developers don't give a fuck, and this is massive exclusive with hundreds of millions dollars budget.

If biggest Ms studios don't give a shit about this (and mesh shaders, SFS etc.), people shouldn't expect third parties to do so.
 

Bojji

Gold Member
how do i turn off hyperthreading, geez. will it break windows to make this run faster

You need to go to bios, look out for some tutorial for your motherboard where the setting is. Windows won't show much difference (if any).
 

damidu

Member
You need to go to bios, look out for some tutorial for your motherboard where the setting is. Windows won't show much difference (if any).
but other games will, i suppose? ill leave it. ill be gpu limited before cpu with a 4070 anyway i think.
cpu is 12900 non K
 
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Bojji

Gold Member
but other games will, i suppose? ill leave it ill be gpu limited before cpu with a 4070 anyway i think.
cpu is 12900 non K

I have 5800x3d with 4070 and I'm GPU limited pretty much all the time. So yeah, unless you want to play at 720p there is no need to mess up with HT.
 

mansoor1980

Member
apart from base resolution of 1440p and shadows , the rest of the settings are really low for 30fps on xsx.
 
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Hugare

Gold Member
"- AMD GPUs run MUCH better than Intel/NVIDIA GPUs, outperforming their counterparts by up to 40%. The 6800 XT for instance consistently outperforms the 3080 by over 25%"

This shit is just ridiculous. Fuck AMD and fuck Bethesda for parterning with this cancer.

Nvidia is greedy, but what AMD is doing is downright criminal
 

winjer

Gold Member
"- AMD GPUs run MUCH better than Intel/NVIDIA GPUs, outperforming their counterparts by up to 40%. The 6800 XT for instance consistently outperforms the 3080 by over 25%"

This shit is just ridiculous. Fuck AMD and fuck Bethesda for parterning with this cancer.

Nvidia is greedy, but what AMD is doing is downright criminal

Just turn on Rebar with nvidia inspector, and that will put the 3080 much closer to the performance of the 6800XT.
Or wait until nvidia whitelists this game on their drivers.
 

damidu

Member
I seem to remember lots of hype when the Xbox Series came out, about how 'load times will be a thing of the past' 🤔
that was the other console, lol
honestly in game loads are not this bad, they are just unbelivably frequent.
this is initial save file load i suppose, its filling the cargo with potates and such, i suppose
 
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winjer

Gold Member
They must not have given Nvidia codes for the game too :messenger_fearful:

All vendors received game code.
Nvidia was the first with optimized driver for Starfield, almost a week before the game launched.
AMD only released theirs a day before launch.
And Intel has so many problems with their drivers, it barely worked for days. But they released 2 updates with many fixes.
 

Bojji

Gold Member
I seem to remember lots of hype when the Xbox Series came out, about how 'load times will be a thing of the past' 🤔

If devs utilized tools and decompression hardware on consoles that would be the case but only some are doing that. This is true for both PS5 and Xbox, many games have terrible CPU limited loading times.

"- AMD GPUs run MUCH better than Intel/NVIDIA GPUs, outperforming their counterparts by up to 40%. The 6800 XT for instance consistently outperforms the 3080 by over 25%"

This shit is just ridiculous. Fuck AMD and fuck Bethesda for parterning with this cancer.

Nvidia is greedy, but what AMD is doing is downright criminal

Amd sponsorer titles are unoptimized turds most of the time, that's why people are afraid of their sponsorships. Both Jedi and this game proves it pretty well. Those games run like shit in general but less shit on AMD hardware.

Nvidia have done many shady shit in the past but their sponsored titles are usually in much better condition.
 

winjer

Gold Member
Amd sponsorer titles are unoptimized turds most of the time, that's why people are afraid of their sponsorships. Both Jedi and this game proves it pretty well. Those games run like shit in general but less shit on AMD hardware.

Nvidia have done many shady shit in the past but their sponsored titles are usually in much better condition.

You do realize that neither AMD, nvidia or Intel optimize games. Their sponsorships are to implement things FSR, DLSS, XeSS, CaCAO, RTX, etc.
There are plenty of games that are very well optimized that were sponsored by AMD. For example Dead Island 2 is probably the best optimized UE4 game in several years.
And there are also several games sponsored by nvidia, that are poorly optimized. Like BF2042, Redfall, Gollum, Warharmmer 40K Darktide, CP 2077, etc...
 

Nfactor_AF

Neo Member
Damn, almost every single setting on Xbox Series X is low (or lower then PC low) settings. Even with all that in check, Creation Engine v2.0 runs at 1080p with Dynamic Resolution + VRS then upscaled to 4K with FSR2 at a mostly 30fps cap. To think this game was originally gonna launch in Nov 2021 lol. What the hell is going on at Bethesda when it comes to their technology and programming engineers. I love Starfield, it's one of favorite games now, but this shit is just straight up dogshit.

To think that after having the biggest AAA game in history flop (Fallout 76 back in 2018) and Todd Howard go into hiding until Microsoft bought the company in 2020, you would think they'd try to be more gracious to gamers, has a big come back to form since the Fallout 76 debacle.

Phil Spencer really is one of the worst Creative Managers in the videogame business. Dude needs to exit videogames and business relation managment. Someone at Xbox Game Studios needs to step in and either force Bethesda to use a new inhouse engine (IDTech7+) or go with Unreal Engine or some thing else new. 21 years after Creation Engine was created for Morrowind, it's time in the sun is over.
 

Mr Moose

Member
Damn, almost every single setting on Xbox Series X is low (or lower then PC low) settings. Even with all that in check, Creation Engine v2.0 runs at 1080p with Dynamic Resolution + VRS then upscaled to 4K with FSR2 at a mostly 30fps cap. To think this game was originally gonna launch in Nov 2021 lol. What the hell is going on at Bethesda when it comes to their technology and programming engineers. I love Starfield, it's one of favorite games now, but this shit is just straight up dogshit.
Isn't it 1440p?
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Damn, almost every single setting on Xbox Series X is low (or lower then PC low) settings. Even with all that in check, Creation Engine v2.0 runs at 1080p with Dynamic Resolution + VRS then upscaled to 4K with FSR2 at a mostly 30fps cap. To think this game was originally gonna launch in Nov 2021 lol. What the hell is going on at Bethesda when it comes to their technology and programming engineers. I love Starfield, it's one of favorite games now, but this shit is just straight up dogshit.

To think that after having the biggest AAA game in history flop (Fallout 76 back in 2018) and Todd Howard go into hiding until Microsoft bought the company in 2020, you would think they'd try to be more gracious to gamers, has a big come back to form since the Fallout 76 debacle.

Phil Spencer really is one of the worst Creative Managers in the videogame business. Dude needs to exit videogames and business relation managment. Someone at Xbox Game Studios needs to step in and either force Bethesda to use a new inhouse engine (IDTech7+) or go with Unreal Engine or some thing else new. 21 years after Creation Engine was created for Morrowind, it's time in the sun is over.

But then the engine boggles the mind





The persistence and physics of objects are next gen

Is it worth the cost for how it looks? I don’t think so personally. But what a weird fucking flex. Imagine the engine engineer spending all that coding ressources that only hoarders will see how neat it is. 99% of peoples will never see it.
 

ZehDon

Gold Member
Why? Game is selling like crazy.
When 80% of their players are using Hardware X, and their game deliberately runs worse on that hardware, that's pretty fucking shitty. I can brute force Starfield - most players can't. Bethesda needs to get their shit together and fix it.
 

Elysium44

Banned
that was the other console, lol
honestly in game loads are not this bad, they are just unbelivably frequent.
this is initial save file load i suppose, its filling the cargo with potates and such, i suppose

You can find videos from 2020 of Digital Foundry and others hyping the SSD and direct storage etc. as eliminating load times. Seems like they overhyped the console like they overhyped this game.

This comment from 3.5 years ago showed how people believed it (and why wouldn't they, they were told by 'trustworthy' sources that it was true).

lL5dOuI.jpg



The catch is that it isn't true. 3.5 years later the most hyped Xbox first party game releases at 4k (upscaled), 30fps and with terrible load times.
 
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