PC gamers who are currently roaming the stars in Starfield are facing serious performance problems. Indeed, the game is very, even too, demanding on hardware resources.
It was eagerly awaited, but here it was officially released yesterday from early access: the game Starfield from Bethesda has just landed on our consoles and PC. Players who are fans of the studio’s games know very well that they are not experts when it comes to optimization. Some bad memories can resurface if we think about the release of the Skyrim in 2011. For Starfield, we knew, we were going to need a relatively beefy PC to play it. But still. A good number of players are faced with more than average in-game performance, despite configurations costing several thousand euros.
Lackluster performance and insufficient graphics options
If we are to believe the configurations recommended by Bethesda, it is possible to still enjoy the game in good conditions without having a very high-end PC. And yet, it manages to put very powerful processors and graphics cards to the test. So of course, this is not always the case, but we feel that the game comes from another time.
This was developed on an evolution of the engine fallout (Creation Engine 2), but PCs suffer. This is particularly the case in areas very loaded with details such as cities (special mention to New Atlantis which you can admire in the screenshot below), while the observation is less alarming in space or in interior.
In terms of graphics options, it’s a bit of a cold shower. They are not very detailed and leave the player without much room for maneuver. No option for exclusive full-screen support, and no possible adjustment of gamma and brightness. No FOV adjustment either. The FSR 2.0 offered by AMD does not seem to work optimally, and DLSS is not natively supported.
Too demanding hardware configuration
On older GPUs, the game is really hard to run, even at lower graphics settings. It even allows itself to test high-end hardware such as the super-powerful RTX 4090, NVIDIA’s flagship. Even so equipped, it remains difficult to maintain the 60 frames per second with parameters set to “intermediate” in 4K. A height. Starfield does not rely on the latest rendering technologies, such as Lumen or Nanite (present in Unreal Engine 5), which may be part of the explanation. The fact is that it is very CPU intensive and will run much better on very high end processors.
Graphically, what does it look like? Here too, the game blows hot and cold. While certain landscapes clearly leave you speechless, as their beauty is astounding, it happens that the rendering on the screen is suddenly just passable. The lighting system, very successful despite the absence of ray tracing, plays an important role in the graphic quality. At certain times of the day (at dawn and at sunset in particular), certain scenes are sublime. But as soon as they are cut off from flare effects and other lighting tricks, the result is much less enticing.
We could have been faced with worse, and despite its modest performances, Starfield benefited from a very decent launch, without too many bugs. Now, players are still waiting for patches to correct these performance issues, and mods are also eagerly awaited!
Sources: Game is Hard, DSOGaming
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