Starfield was released simultaneously for PC and Xbox consoles, and it’s important to start by mentioning the available improvements, the possibility of superior performance, and the variety of mods created by players, which make this the best way to play it if your hardware allows it. However, that doesn’t mean the PC version is fantastic, but all criticisms presented on this page should be viewed in that light. Nevertheless, it’s evident that there are many issues that need to be addressed for the game to be in good condition.
### Performance and Graphics Options
The good news is that Starfield is released without some of the major problems we’ve seen in a series of PC games this year. Shader compilation with stuttering? As far as I know, it’s not an issue. A quick pre-compilation step when starting the game solves the problem. However, there is still some stuttering, but it’s not clearly related to shader compilation. After so many problems with this in many games this year, these are great news.
In terms of graphics options and player experience, there are problems. Let’s start with the settings page, which offers a series of adjustment options with a clear path to provide an optimized experience. The problem is that the game doesn’t do anything to show what changing the settings actually does, nor does it try to inform about performance gains and quality losses in doing so. Fear not: we can help you with optimized settings, but it took many hours of testing with a video capture device and reference to the Xbox Series X version of the game. Players won’t have this insight and will make adjustments blindly, without any clear understanding of how things may or may not be improving for their specific hardware.
### Lack of Basic Options and Modding Community
The biggest flaw is the lack of basic options, starting with the absence of a field of view option. The default FOV seems optimized for consoles and is clearly too claustrophobic for many PC users, and I find it astonishing that a first-person title is released without this option, considering it’s such a basic accessibility issue. Yes, users can do a quick Google search to find the necessary .ini tweaks, but they shouldn’t be forced to do so. Similarly, there is no anisotropic filtering option – the game sometimes has strangely weak texture filtering, even on the highest settings. Why can’t this be changed? Yes, it’s possible to force 16x AF through the GPU control panel, but this causes major issues with shadows in the game.
It’s clear that Bethesda games are rightly praised for their modding capabilities, and there is clearly a dedicated modding community already working wonders to improve the PC version of the game. Aside from texture filtering issues, many of my problems can be solved, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the “ready to play” experience covers the essential aspects of the player experience. This also extends to HDR support, where there is no native functionality, despite being on Xbox. Meanwhile, SDR grading can also look quite bizarre, with a grayish and low-contrast appearance. Modders are creating alternative LUTs and real HDR support, but again, this is a development task being left to the community and doesn’t seem right.
We’ve said it once and we’ve said it before. The support for all the image reconstruction techniques from developers can be a huge advantage and fosters goodwill – and I say all of this without going into details about DLSS 3 frame generation mods or the fact that the game doesn’t natively support 32:9 monitors correctly. In my opinion, the graphical options of Starfield are not the best and the community is too focused on compensating for the obvious shortcomings. It’s great that the community does these things and I highly recommend people use these options, easily found on Nexus Mods, but so far, we’re just talking about the basics. The basics that Bethesda should have included at launch.
That being said, Starfield was released with versions for Xbox consoles, but PC has clear advantages, such as much faster loading times according to the hardware nature. In my tests, loading the same file on the Xbox Series X compared to a Core i9 12900K and a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD revealed that the game loads in less than a third of the time. So, if your equipment is up to par, all the waiting time seen on the Xbox Series X is drastically reduced on PC, leading to a much faster experience.
Graphically, Starfield is an extremely challenging game – and we will discuss the hot topic of optimization at the right time. However, I highly recommend watching the video above to see how each of the settings is scaled and where the Xbox Series X fits in. It is important to set equivalent settings for the console, as this shows us how the creator himself chooses his own optimized settings for conventional hardware that shouldn’t be expected to run the best settings. I made some changes based on my own experience running Starfield on a conventional PC with a Ryzen 5 3600 paired with an RTX 2070 Super and you can see the results above – but without using the dynamic resolution option. It only works with v-sync active and only if it’s below 30 fps. And even then, the option does not provide a correct frame rate of 30 fps, making it useless in our opinion.
GPU Performance Discrepancies
Let’s talk about the overall GPU performance, because this game is heavy – and it is clearly disproportionate for Nvidia and Intel hardware users, a situation that hints at a bad omen for the AMD sponsorship element in the game. AMD hardware outperforms Nvidia equivalents across the board, in a way that hardly reflects the standard performance profiles of the respective cards. In my GPU testing area, AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT outperforms Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 by an impressive 40 percent on ultra settings. Let’s be clear: the 6800 XT is a good card, but it’s generally on par with the 3080. Using optimized settings improves the frame stability of the RTX 3080 and the difference drops to 35 percent, but this behavior is not normal and is not due to the difference between 16GB and 10GB of VRAM. In fact, the VRAM management in Starfield is generally excellent, to the point that even 8GB GPUs can run the game at maximum ultra settings at 4K.
Day one GPU drivers don’t magically appear out of nowhere – they require Nvidia, AMD, and Intel to have early access to the code to work with developers on specific issues and for driver teams to produce their own custom optimizations for their hardware. The fact that Starfield didn’t work at all on Intel’s GPUs at launch (with software teams providing two driver updates since then) suggests that something went very wrong in this case and, once again, raises questions about sponsorships and custom integrations. Even after those two driver updates, Intel’s Arc A770 performance lags behind an RTX 2070 Super and even a basic AMD RX 5700, which doesn’t make much sense.
Performance Optimization and Issues
Starfield is also demanding on the CPU side of the equation. The frontier town of Akila is a good stress test for the processor and, even with optimized settings (which reduce CPU load), the Ryzen 5 3600 falls below 60 frames per second. CPU tests are also interesting in that you can see clear stuttering in traversal, and when switching to my Core i9 12900K, the stuttering persists – but for less time. Looking at core usage, a cursory glance suggests that the game adapts well to cores, which is good news. However, a deeper analysis of the 12900K’s performance shows that the most ideal configuration is to use the processor’s eight p-cores, with hyperthreading disabled and e-cores also turned off. On the other hand, on my Ryzen 5 3600, the game saturates all cores and threads and disabling SMT (AMD’s hyperthreading alternative) results in noticeably inferior consistency.
This is just an example of two processors, but I’ve also seen reports showing that top-of-the-line Intel chips can outperform AMD’s market-leading Ryzen 7 7800X3D without disabling HT or e-cores, so I’m not sure what conclusions we can draw from this, other than that CPU utilization may benefit from some work on specific architectures.
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