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Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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It does not matter how extensive the lore, character design and world building is if the fucking game runs like shit and crashes. The game being in a playable state is the bare minimum.
Its like a chef spending hours decorating a dish made with spoiled raw chicken.
The fact that it literally can't run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?
And don't even get me started on how I keep feeling like I'm playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I've heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield...
This is what happens when a new console generation comes around. Just because you are on PC does not mean you are exempt from industry norms which are largely pushed by consoles. Your 970 was significantly stronger than the xbox one and the ps4, so you could use it for that entire generation if you wanted. Your 2060 is weaker than the xbox series x and the ps5, so should be no surprise that you use lower settings than those consoles.
Same with ssds. They werent required for so long because the consoles didnt have them. Now they do, and fast ones at that. So devs use them, and sometimes require them.
Now obviously starfield in particular is not a shining beacon of next gen technology and optimization. But those reasons you chose to pick on are not really examples of its failings.
It's worth noting that though those are the "recommended" settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I've played, including other AAA releases from this year. It's my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA's recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I've ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur's Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.
I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it's all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.
Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.