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

Because the author is bizarrely ignorant for something that's published. Oh wait, it's 2023. It's about click through, not accuracy. My b.

Indeed. "this would have the fewest bugs any Bethesda game ever shipped with." as said by MS.

Which is probably the platonic ideal of "damning with faint praise."

Yep, like the Sun not showing up

https://www.pcgamer.com/in-starfield-the-sun-literally-doesnt-shine-on-amd-gpu-users/

I mean it’s an Xbox game made with AMD.

Bizarre indeed

It's unexpected for nvidia users, who have grown used to games being optimised for them rather than AMD users.

PS5 and Xbox Series both run on AMD hardware. Do you really think AMD has the cash to bribe Microsoft?

Well, maybe. It's optimised for the Xbox which runs AMD hardware.

Noo you're not allowed to enjoy the game, the internet people said that Bethesda are terrible developers and the game runs like shit

From what I recall from one of their Directs, Digital Foundry corroborated another outlet's finding that ultra settings (and I think specifically ultra shadows) are unoptimized. Tons of weird frame time jittering, and like a 15% drop in FPS compared to AMD. So, if you have shadows turned to High or lower, that'll explain it. Otherwise, what they're saying is an AMD equivalent would be getting 70-80 fps in your case.

lemmy guess, you are less than 8 hours in the game?

What CPU are you using? I've read it can be CPU heavy.

What are your settings?

The game runs well on midnrange pcs, but it scales terribly as you move up the stack. It has the problem crysis had.

In my mind the 980ti is still only a couple years old, so I went to check.

1. Eight years. Fuck me, I'm still not used to this starting to feel old thing.

I get the same error on the same hardware. Luckily, I have a steam deck I can play it on while the issue (hopefully) gets resolved in Proton. It doesn't run very well on the steam deck, though. But it is playable.

I've been running it on my GTX 960. Looks piss poor, but I've been able to play without much issue.

I Uninstaller graphics drivers on my boyfriends pc and reinstalled them manually to get that fixed. GeForce experience install wasn't working.

Not surprising, game devs aren't really testing with Intel GPUs or working with Intel driver devs.

There will probably be a driver fix in a week or two though. Intel seem to be progressing fast.

I'm in. 2070S and also don't experience what everybody is talking about.

I've had a similar experience (and similar performance) on my all-AMD rig. There's slowdown in cities but nothing that makes the game unplayable.

Still, it should be optimized.

It could also be something very specific about how they have their system configured.

Source: Work in tech support and it's astounding the number of programs and little settings that can break completely unrelated things on a computer

Yeah, I second that. I run the game to a perfectly playable extent, low-to-medium settings, and I have a barely better GPU, 1660-Ti, with a 10th gen laptop i7

Hell, my rig doesn't even meet minimum specs (Ryzen 5 2600 and a RX 570) and other than periodic CTDs (fuck Akila City, that was like every 5 min) its run like a dream.

A graphics card company ensuring software performs better on their GPU?

Time to switch to nvidia. They would never do such a thing.

LOL

Feel like this isn't the best take. AMD working with Bethesda to make sure the game works on their card doesn't come close to implying they made sure it didn't work on Nvidia cards. Nvidia should've been working to make sure the game ran well on their cards too.

Nvidia has been pulling the tricks you're talking about for years now, though

Jesus, Nvidia has been doing cut throat shit like this for years.

Microsoft owns Bethesda. Microsoft owns Xbox.

Xbox uses AMD GPUs and CPUs.

So the game being optimised for AMD makes absolute sense for Microsoft.

AMD paying for access to optimise for thier PC CPUs and GPUs makes sense for AMD.

However not optimising the game for Intel and Nvidia does not make sense for Microsoft. This is more likely to be an oversight/typical poor AAA game launch than deliberate play to benefit AMD. Other games like Cyberpunk 2077 for example had problems on CPUs/GPUs, we have selection biase here where there are fewer problems on AMD systems, and also a generally reasonably solid launch.

Its frustrating but most of the issues are optimisation, not game breaking. The experience on Intel/Nvidia systems is good, just not as good as it could be. One of the examples in the article was a framerate of 95 FPS vs 105 FPS - that may have been avoidable, but it's a minor annoyance at best. Some of this (not all but some) is just obsessing over minutia and things that won't affect the player experience.

So basically storm in a tea cup, and much of this the usual post launch technical difficulties that will be optimised with patches. This is why people shouldn't buy games at launch, although so far at least we haven't seen the game breaking bugs that have dogged other AAA titles at launch.

AMD has clearly had a hand in making sure this performs better on their GPUs

NVIDIA's entire business model is brand-exclusive proprietary software. Last I checked you can use FSR on NVIDIA but you can't use DLSS on AMD.

That's a pretty bold conspiracy theory. Nvidia outsells AMD by a pretty huge margin. As does Intel in CPUs. What would get Bethesda to deliberately favor AMD tech and hobble Nvidia? That would merely give them a LOT of negative press, as we are seeing now.

The idea of bribery is right out because Bethesda is owned by MS. The idea of laziness is also not great because as above, there's more Intel/Nvidia users so it'd be easier to only prioritize one set of hardware, the most common, if laziness was the goal.

Most likely it's as someone below said: this game was primarily designed around console performance. Both of which, the Xbox and PS5, use AMD hardware. And Bethesda is either too inept or too time-constricted to get it to run well on the primary PC hardware. This is, pretty damn common in the games industry: allowing PC performance to flounder because they are a smaller set of sales.

But MS has no incentive for Nvidia cards to not work well because 99% of PC users are Windows users and most likely run this on Gamepass, an MS product.

Xboxes run on AMD GPUS.

Nvidia does this all the time. If anything, I'd like to see more games focused on AMD graphics, it's a tactic that AMD as a company has been getting whomped by.

Ideally, though, there would be better support for all graphics platforms, though.

I don't think it's deliberate, per se, but Bethesda was clear about who they were partnering with, long ago. If a graphics company is trying to help you optimize for their platform, they aren't going to be stressing abouy the impact on their competitors.

force it to use resizable bar and get more fps

If this is true, it means the game is designed around a UMA architecture, i.e. xbox. Nobody in their right mind tries to map more than 256MB of CPU memory concurrently for a single frame. Either that or the engine is completely shit at resource streaming (also characteristic of console-first games), and so is relying on the OS to demand-page random resources as needed.

I tried that and saw no difference unfortunately.

I'm just confused because I have an i9 9900k and a 4070ti, neither are even remotely close to being worked hard and yet I can't break 50fps. Like half vram usage and maybe 10% CPU/GPU usage. I thought I had it running smoothly, but it's a smooth 30fps...