Starfield is a “bizarrely worse experience” on Nvidia and Intel, says Digital Foundry

Why is it bizarre they clearly put all their effort into making it run on the Xbox and that’s AMD hardware.

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.

Don’t worry, there will be plenty bugs left for AMD users as well.

In this thread, people who understand very little about technology and how it works

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.

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.

It is? Am I doing something wrong? Because I get a solid 60-70 fps at all times on a 3070ti

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.

Starfield doesn't even run on Arc GPUs.

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.

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.

My 3080 is bottlenecks by my ancient CPU and it runs fine for me.

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"