Todd Howard asked on-air why Bethesda didn't optimise Starfield for PC: 'We did [...] you may need to upgrade your PC'

Unless I'm completely mistaken here, modders didn't combine the buildings together, that's how they are by default. Mods, however, sometimes needed to break said system which resulted in massively degraded performance.

I mean, yeah I guess this does help temper expectations that they are done optimising, so maybe you're right, being blunt is probably for the best.

At what framerate?

I'm shocked at home many PC users are still running HDDs given that SSDs have been standard ok consoles for three years now.

Playing on ultra on a 3060 ? So you're getting 20-30 fps? Because that's what it gets on mine with a much newer CPU. I had to turn it down to med-high to average 45 fps

It's a shame idTech is no longer released publicly. It would've been amazing to see what people could do with the beast of an engine that powered DOOM Eternal, especially modders.

I assume you're talking about Rage, which had an open world map, but no where near the level of simulation systems as a Bethesda game. In fact I remember back at the time most of us saying the map was pointless as it was just a way to travel between levels with nothing to do in it.

You are completely talking out of your ass.

They could do everything they usually do but better if they used Unreal. They don't need a custom engine. They just need an engine that isn't over 2 decades old with a bunch of shit taped to it to make it look modern. Not to mention, ID already did make a custom built engine that handles much of what Bethesda RPGs do when they made RAGE. They could have used that, with the only issue being learning it. Not sure what their turnover rate is like... maybe they're just too used to GameBryo/Creation to be able to switch now. It might take too long to learn anything new. Plus it would have to be able to have a toolset. If they didn't release those easy to use modding tools, there could be rioting in the streets.

If Bethesda can't take the time to do it then who can? People act like they're some small time developer but they're not. They simply refuse to expand their dev team to do things like a redesign.

Creation engine is not going to hold up well for another 6 years, there's no way their cell loading system will be considered acceptable by the time ES6 comes out. The amount of loading screens in Starfield is insane for a modern game. This company needs new talent badly.

I've got an 8086K and 3080, running on a 4K screen - with Ultra settings and FSR of 80% I'm getting 35-40fps, which honestly doesn't feel too bad. It's noticable sometimes but it's a lot smoother than the numbers suggest.

Because my CPU is a little long in the tooth, I've gone probably a bit hard on the visuals, but my framerate didn't improve much by lowering it. The engine itself has never really liked going past 60fps, so I don't know why people expected to be able to run 100+ frames at 4k or something.

I've got that but with a 4080 - no issues.

I admittedly feel like I went full retard on my build and seriously hope these specs aren't what's necessary...

sure mister gamedev, please continue to tell more on how an engine you clearly worked on, should run...

I dont say that Starfield is a well optimised game and performance will get better with upcoming patches. But I also don't think it's an unoptimized mess, I think it is running reasonable and people really should start review their rig, because modern games will need modern components

Oh and also other games did not run that well like you maybe remember ;)

After all this time I don't think I ever heard anything about how Crysis plays or what's the story and such. People only talk about how hard it was to run and how fancy these graphics were. Doesn't make it sound all that great.

Wtf Crysis 1 was awesome... At least the first part without the aliens... And not because of the graphics

I have the same processor and no issues. 1440p 80-125 fprs, high Details, 100% and FSR2

It's system by system, I have the same cpu and do fairly well, admittedly with it boosting to 4.5ghz. My wife has the same cpu and it struggles on her machine. It feels like the game just wasn't tested well.

But it didnt tho, it looks shit and hogs more resources compared to other games like cyberpunk which is probably a better example for next gen graphics

Please explain in detail how Starfield is pushing the edge graphically in any way that's comparable to Crysis.

Also please explain how you expect them to improve as a developer when you refuse to criticize them.

They don't think that. They just know that the people will pay up anyway, bringing in the profits for shareholders and the C-suite, and that's all that matters.

The DLCs, cosmetics, MTX, etc. are all pretty much alive and well despite everything just because enough people cash out, so why change their ways?

AAA gaming is a big industry, and big industries are nothing wholesome.

That's not an answer that people would have accepted either and no matter what answer was said, it would have been dissected and criticized by the syllable.

The point I'm trying to make here is that "optimize your game" doesn't help anybody. Especially not as an interview question. You might as well have asked "why didn't you make your game fun?"

RX480 is an AMD card that came out 7 years ago, not the GTX 480.

Looks like you’re right. You have to scroll to the bottom of the Xbox page to see Xbox X and S as system requirement.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/starfield

Oh.

Well, I got what I wanted, carry on.

Maybe they really lost their ladder. Why Todd would know where it is beats me, tho. Or maybe Todd is one of those people you lend stuff to and will never give it back.

yea idk if used cars or rent are good comparisons.

I'm not saying it's not an expensive hobby, it is. PC gaming on ultra is an incredibly expensive hobby. But that's the price of the hobby. Saying that a game isn't optimized because it doesn't run ultra settings on hardware that came out 4+ years ago is nothing new, and to me it's a weird thing to demand. If you want ultra, you pay for ultra prices. If you don't want to/can't, that's 100% acceptable, but then just be content to play on High settings, maybe 1080p.

If PC gaming is too expensive in general that's why consoles exist. You get a pretty great experience on a piece of hardware that's only a few hundred dollars.

Consoles don't even last their whole life time anymore, both machines required pro models to keep up with performance last gen and rumours have it Sony are gearing up for one this gen too.

and no one is saying they have to, that's my point that keeps getting overlooked. If someone wants to play sick 4k 120fps that's awesome, but you're going to pay a premium for that. If people are upset because they can't play ultra settings on hardware that came out 5 years ago, to me that's snobby behavior. The choice is either pay up for top of the line hardware, or be happy with medium settings and maybe you go back in a few years and play it on ultra.

If the game doesn't play at all on lower hardware (like Cyberpunk did on release), then that is not fair and needs to be addressed. The game plain did not work for lower end hardware, and that's not fair at all, it wasn't about how well it played, it's that it didn't play.

I mean, yeah but also by what metric. There's a thousand things that can affect performance and not just what we see. We know Starfield has a massive drive footprint, so most everything is probably high end textures, shaders, etc. Then the world sizes themselves are large. I don't know, how do you directly compare two games that look alike? Red Dead 2 still looks amazing, but at 5 years old it's already starting to show it's age, but it also had a fixed map size, but it got away with a few things, etc etc etc every game is going to have differences.

My ultimate point is that you can't expect to get ultra settings on a brand new game unless you're actively keeping up on hardware. There's no rules saying that you have to play on 4K ultra settings, and people getting upset about that are nuts to me. It's a brand new game, my original comment was me saying that I'm surprised it runs as good as it does on the last generation hardware.

I played Borderlands 1 on my old ATI card back in 2009 in windowed mode, at 800x600, on Low settings. My card was a few years old and that's the best I could do, but I loved it. The expectation that a brand new game has to work flawlessly on older hardware is a new phenomenon to me, it's definitely not how we got started in PC gaming.

Doom eternal also came out 3.5 years ago now, and your card is nearly 5 years old. That's the performance I would expect from a card that is that old playing a brand new game that was meant to be a stretch.

I'm sorry, but this is how PC gaming works. Brand new cards are really only awesome for about a year, then good for a few years after that, then you start getting some new releases that make you think it's about time. I've had the 3000 series, the 1000 series, before that I was an ATI guy with some sapphire, and before that the ATI 5000 series. It's just how it goes in PC gaming, this is nothing new

I say entitled because gamers should just be happy, be happy with the hardware you have even if it can't put out 4k, turn off the FPS counter, play the game. If you're enjoying it, who cares if it occasionally dips down to 55? The entitlement comes from expecting game makers to produce games that run flawlessly at ultra settings on hardware that's several years old. If you want that luxury, you have to spend a shitload of money on the top of the line gear, otherwise just be happy with your rig.

This is a great way to view it, and I think you're getting excellent specs for that card. Kudos to you for getting it running !

I mean, there isn't one thing you can point to and say "ah ha that's causing all teh lag", things just take up more space, more compute power, more memory as it grows. As hardware capabilities grow software will find a way to utilize it. But if you want a few things

• Textures are larger, where 4k was just getting rolling in 2017 (pre RDR2 after all), to accomodate 4K textures had to be scaled up (and remember width and height, so that's 4x the memory and 4x the space on drive)
• Engines have generally grown to be more high fidelity including more particles, more fog, (not in Starfield but Raytracing, which is younger than 2017), etc. All of these higher fidelity items require more computer power. Things like anti-aliasing for example, they're always something like 8x, but that's 8x the resolution, which the resolutions have only gone up, again rising with time.

I don't know what do you want? Like a list of everything that's happened from then? Entire engines have come and gone in that time. Engines we used back then we're on at least a new version compared to then, Starfield included. I mean I don't understand what you're asking, because to me it comes off as "Yeah well Unreal 5 has the same settings as 4 to me, so it's basically the same"

I'm curious, I have a 3080 as well and I'm getting ultra across the board and I average 60fps, maybe a setting or two is at high, also 1440p. Installed on an SSD, right? Render scale for me is 75%, only other thing I can think of is I overclocked my ram? But I don't think that'd account for that huge of a jump

Why does it need to go above 60fps? It's not a twitch FPS where every bit of latency counts. It's an RPG and 60 is perfectly smooth.

To be fair that's a lot more money than a console.

What did you buy for $700 that can play every game at max?

Any recommendations?

Actually its quite the opposite usualy and games on conosles run well while on pc they can be a buggy mess. Granted on pc they will/can look better but the optimization is mostly done for console players.

The game averages 75fps with a 4090 or 7900xtx at 4k high settings