Analyzing Starfield’s Performance on Nvidia’s 4090 and AMD’s 7900 XTX | Hacker News Reader

Analyzing Starfield’s Performance on Nvidia’s 4090 and AMD’s 7900 XTX

chipsandcheese.com

166 pointsgautamcgoel142 comments

Starfield is an interesting analysis choice because, for what you get, the performance is horrid.

Starfield looks worse, and runs slower at 4K, on my RTX 3090/7800x3d than Cyberpunk 2077 does on my laptop 2060. Thats insane! And even setting the Nvidia bias aside, Cyberpunk 2077 is a busy game, and no pariah of optimization.

Also, speaking as a diehard BGS fan since Oblivion and a diehard sci fi lover who even enjoyed ME Andromeda... Starfield seems kinda dull? I don't really get what all the fuss is about.

But what if you compare Starfield performance with Cyberpunk's at the release time? Will it be still as different as now? I obviously don't know what happens in the future, but maybe some optimizations will come to Starfield as well?

I played about half of Cyberpunk on release at 1440p on low with fsr (render resolution about 1080p) at about 30fps. It ran and looked good. On same system with starfield I get about 10-20 fps (render resolution about 480p) and that is just the intro before going to any city. It looks like crap. Runs like crap. And crashes every couple minutes.

On top of this, Fallout 4 didn't get much faster with time. Neither did Oblivon/Fallout 3.

Skyrim kinda did with SSE? But that took a looong time.

Cyberpunk visuals knocked my socks off. They still do (even more now). Once CP77 expansion comes out at the end of the month with dlss3.5, starfield will look like even more trash. Trying to play starfield after bg3 has led me to a disappointing experience due to the face textures alone.

>>, and no pariah of optimization.

Cyberpunk runs perfectly well on the Steam Deck, while Starfield struggles to stay above 20fps(this is me agreeing with you btw)

>> Starfield seems kinda dull? I don't really get what all the fuss is about.

Because it is. Eurogamer put it into words right - Bethesda games were always about exploration, in Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout it was always core part of the experience to point your character in any direction then keep walking and see what comes up. Some of my best memories of those games were of doing exactly that. In Starfield this isn't entirely absent, but it feels....pointless. You are either coming across randomly generated events which makes it feel like playing an MMO, or just warping between locations which don't really matter. Like some people said - even after not playing Oblivion for 10 years I can find my way to Kvatch without even thinking about it, the locations were super memorable. In Starfield there's no point in even learning their names, it's all just there as set decoration(outside of the few main cities).

I think digital foundry mentioned each planet has one main attraction/city and not much else outside of that. I could see how that would put a damper on exploration.

and the multiple load screens between you and your destination really hurts my time in starfield.

There are mods to increase the amount of 'random instances' that are created on a planet when you land, which takes the game from 'isolated-feeling space exploration game with not much to do' to 'everyone else has already built hundreds or thousands of facilities on every single planet or moon in the galaxy.

What's the name of the mod (or mods)?

knew I recognized this comment. Starfield looks perfectly fine, with some pretty impressive vistas to admire, and that with a RTX 3070 at 5760x1200

I remember when I first saw No Man's Sky I just wanted it as a screensaver. I don't have the time to invest in a second job as a space explorer, but I sure can enjoy looking through a window of a spaceship going to exotic places.

Yeah, the style and worldbuilding seems fine, which is no surprise from a BGS game.

Neither is the janky feeling of the engine.

Yet some of the magic is not there...

> , for what you get, the performance is horrid.

I have a 5 year old Alienware laptop that I use for the occasional PC gaming.

The graphics were horrendous. I found the problem was related to how Starfield generates the settings. It didn't correctly determine the performance of the machine.

I set everything to Medium, switched off film grain/motion blur, then played with draw distance until I got quality screen and good performance.

> Starfield seems kinda dull?

Not going to lie, the first 3 hours were painful for me. So much so I was planning to give up on it. The game does open up, and when it does... wow.

I think I have around 50 hours of gameplay and I've barely scratched it.

I have ~25 hours and I'm bored to tears. I've unlocked the first couple of powers, finished a few corp quest chains, but nothing about the game has grabbed me, and I have similar complaints as the GP: it's dull, the universe feels huge but flat, empty, and pointless.

I'm full of regret both that this is the most expensive game I've ever bought, plus that I upgraded my GPU just to play it.

I really want to love Starfield, and based on comments like yours I keep feeling like somehow I'm missing something. Should I keep playing? Does it get better, or do we just have vastly different tastes?

That sucks. I'm about 20 hours in (almost completely sidequests, I think I'm still in the second main storyline quest) and loving it, but that's how I've always played Bethesda games. I go and make my own fun as soon as possible.

Not every game's for everyone though, and a good rule is to wait a month or so on single player games so you can see what reviewers who align with your taste think.

> for what you get, the performance is horrid.

Well Starfield is the n-th iteration of Bethesda hacking on their Gamebryo fork, and this has always been true (Fallout 4 - Skyrim - Oblivion). Not that these were bad looking games in their day, but they always kinda ran like dog.

They weren't bad looking, but neither of those games were celebrated as graphical masterpieces either. As far back as I can remember, Bethesda has always made games with behind-the-curve but acceptable graphics, with bad performance and lots of bugs. It's the incredible moddability that justified all of this, with mods elevating those games to great graphics, as well as eventually fixing any other shortcomings.

Oblivion was more cutting edge at the time, and it sheer scale (along with Morrowind's) was quite unique.

The fuss is apparently many people love the Bethesda RPG formula.

I personally don't, it bored me already by Morrowind and have given Skyrim and Fallout 3 few chances, but I know there's many millions that love it, and I guess Starfield is for them.

I was really really hyped for a new Bethesda game. After a few weeks playing Baldur’s Gate 3, though, Starfield just landed completely flat with me. Characters just feel completely lifeless, both in terms of voice acting and in how they move.

i'm still playing the latest zelda.

I'm only really excited in Starfield as an updated RPG modding sandbox. So the real release, for me, is next year.

This is what I have decided. I am leaving it in the oven and will see what happening on the Nexus in a year.

Calling it horrid is honestly too kind.

Granted I’ve been spoiled with my Strix 3090OC/12900K which was consistently able to crank out high amount of frames at 4K and ultra settings out of the box for any title I threw at it but I knew that couldn’t last forever.

Starfield seems exceptionally poorly optimized however and runs like dogshit even after abandoning ultra or even high settings. I’m looking at an average fps of around 40 in mundane indoor settings.

This would be less egregious if the game at least looked amazing and had all the bells and whistles like ray tracing etc. But it looks awful even on ultra, some of the textures look like they’re meant to be an easter egg as a throwback to the original Doom.

Scaling the resolution barely makes a dent and it also doesn't help that I can't access the most useful mods because MS fuckery with the Gamepass edition.

On the XBSX it’s even worse, it would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so sad that MS still isn’t able to produce an XB exclusive that can hold a candle to Sony’s exclusives.

And don’t get me started on the actual gameplay/story experience.

I too am a big BGS fan, since back in the Morrowind days and I too am one of the few Andromeda fans (there’s dozens of us, dozens!), but this one feels underbaked even for BGS’ standards. In particular the opening of the game, as if they forgot to replace the placeholder storyline and gameplay with the actual story.

After my first 4 hours or so I was still waiting for the game to really start to the point that I was convinced the game had glitched on me and skipped the beginning or something so I looked up a let’s play only to be dumbfounded that my game was working as intended.

All in all it’s such a weird game to me, like it’s a beta or something.

I play an hour here and there every once in a while, hoping to be hooked and see what others seem to be seeing, but if anything it makes me want to repurchase No Man’s Sky on Steam (had a copy way back when for the PS4 but lost it during a move).

> one of the few Andromeda fans (there’s dozens of us, dozens!)

Maybe even many dozens!

But yeah. I know my nostalgia glasses are strong, and that every game from Oblivion to 4 has a dull main quest and some dully written side quests among the gems, but I thoroughly enjoyed digging for those gems and all the little worldbuilding in between. Andromeda was kinda like that too, but with (IMO) much more solid combat, but the expectations from the public were totally different.

But... I am not running into the gems in my short time in Starfield so far.

another Andromeda fan checking in :)

That series certainly had its problems, but the ideas in it were sound.

For a supposedly next-gen game, it sure didn't take long for Starfield to get an HD texture pack mod from the community.

I have a 5800x and an RX 6800 XT - definitely not a low-end system - and this is the worst performance I've had in a game. I have a 4K display and use FSR2 with 50% (!!) render scale in order to maintain as close to 60 FPS as possible.

All that for a game that looks pretty okay, with uncanny valley NPCs, awkward (awful?) animations, and fine I guess graphics overall. It doesn't look like 'Creation Engine 2' levels of quality, it looks like a well-done Skyrim mod. It looks as impressive as the HD mod packs I've tried for Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim, but it runs far worse.

It's not an apples to apples comparison, but Baldur's Gate 3's level of detail in texturing, character design, and animations was mind-blowing; Starfield has a mid-range level of detail and very clearly didn't bother with any sort of motion capture (and the voice acting for a lot of NPCs is mediocre as well).

I've become such a huge fan of the writeups from chipsandcheese. I've not found anywhere else that regularly produces technical analysis on this level. Such a joy to read

Agreed. I really appreciate their deep dives into uArch - their article on the Zen4's front and back end answered so many questions for me..

Fully agree, it filled a Dr. Ian Cutress shaped hole in my life. I've learned so much over the last year. It has come to the point where I'm only mildly interested in benchmarks of a new product launch from Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Arm, what I really wait for is clamchowder's uArch deep dives.

Also a friendly reminder that you can support their journalism via Patreon.

The number of people in the world who can both understand this stuff in that much detail whilst also being able to explain it in a straightforard and understandable way must be extremely low.

I’ve been very impressed by the 7900 XTX. For pure gaming performance I think it’s a better option than the 4090 considering how close it is in performance for way less money. My experience running Starfield at 4K has been pretty positive.

I have a 7900 XTX too but Starfield is a bit of an outlier. On average the 7900 XTX is usually a bit above a 4080 and well behind a 4090. Still great value since its cheaper than a 4080.

Is it a stable experience? I've bought the 5700xt and the 6900xt and both cards were/still are unstable messes with countless ignored bugs.

I run on an ultra-wide with an 7900 XTX. And there was a specific bug (that was acknowledged in the AMD driver release notes) that causes crashes if dynamic resolution is turned on (dynamic resolution is turned on by default) so I had several crashes on the first night of early release prior to discovering the "fix" (turn off dynamic resolution). I've had one hard crash to the desktop since then and a couple of hangs where I basically had to force quit. I only have about 15 hours logged.

I've encountered a ton of bugs though. Nothing game breaking so far.

I had a 6750xt before this. I’ve had nothing but stable experiences on both cards.

Are you sure your power supply was large enough? I had similar stability issues with the 6900xt until I upgraded my PSU.

Yeah it is. My issues are mostly very weird situations that aren't high power. Watching yt on Firefox while playing league of legends for example, that's a gpu load of 10% at most. For some reason Firefox turns insanely laggy and full of green blocky artefacts. Or the good old cursor duplication glitch(which existed on the 5700xt for a year and a half and was eventually fixed)

And best part is, it means you can ditch windows comfortably in case they piss you off enough.

My main reason for going AMD was Linux support.

I have a 7900 XT, and while I like it I really wish I'd sprung for the extra X. Oh well. Next time! (Unless AMD really does ignore the high end next gen, in which case I guess I'm SOL).

The only reason is amd partnership, not overall performance gain. Things may smooth out in upcoming months/years as they patch it.

AMD seems to have moved to a “gameworks” style business model where all their sponsored titles run like crap, but they run more like crap on the competition (and increasingly lock out intel entirely etc, as Bethesda has refused to support these etc).

And this goes beyond just starfield. Ok, Bethesda sucks. Jedi Survivor ran like crap too.. does respawn suck? TLOU ran like crap too, does naughty dog suck too? Harry potter ran like shit too.

And TLOU is not even a new game!

I’m very curious what exactly is going on with the devrel side of AMD’s sponsorship of these titles. What assistance is AMD providing with their sponsorship, and what is the nature of what they are willing to do and not do in terms of the optimizations etc?

Maybe this pipeline bubble stuff is the result of something AMD is pushing for consoles, and they just don’t care about the effect it has on PCs (even their own) or they actively encourage it.

Can I play "guess the rendering technique"? I assume that the longest-running pixel shader implements deferred shading, and the longest-running compute shader is doing some form of light transport, with the many texture reads doing some form of ray gathering resulting in few writes.

Most modern AAA engines do deferred lighting/shading in compute too

BGS games are notorious for really weird bottlenecks, like Skyrim's much loathed CPU shadows.

Good analysis, but like all good analysis this needs a followup for all the questions created by this analysis...

This suggests that the AMD 7900 XTX has better utilization than the NVidia 4090 (which is extremely surprising to me!!). Is there a "smaller NVidia" that could be used to see if utilization scales with size? The 4090 is physically and architecturally larger than the 7900 XTX after all.

There's also a question about smaller AMD cards, as the 7900 XTX has the largest "infinity cache". Do 16MB sized infinity caches keep utilization high? Or is this something that's only going to work on the 7900 XTX?

Just some idle thoughts. I'm personally interested in how the architectures utilization scales going up or down, and why that is. That is, VALU utilization for AMD, specifically (and SM Issue Active for NVidia or maybe SM ALU).

They do discuss the smaller caches lead to worse utilization but overall lead to better performance due to the trade offs. It’s in the conclusion at the end.

It's my understanding that Bethesda partnered with AMD when building this game, hence the original lack of DLSS. I wouldn't be surprised if it's better optimized for AMD cards as a result. I would expect the same situation in reverse for a game that partnered more closely with NVidia to take advantage of and show off its features.

Case in point : Cyberpunk 2077. Runs much at a higher fidelity than SF and is very much a showcase piece for Nvidia.

They dropped new drivers and the game yesterday, seems to smooth things over already. They are also going to talk to Intel, Nvidia and AMD to improve performance.

Nvidia claims that their driver update achieves about a 5% performance uplift on RTX 4000 cards. So if you were getting 80 FPS in New Atlantis, you'd now get 84 FPS instead.

From what I've seen Bethesda tried to get Nvidia support in optimizing for release but the game division at Nvidia is not getting resources because server/AI market is where the money is at and they only have so much experts available.

I wouldn't be surprised if this became a common theme with Nvidia in the future.

Starfield is getting poor utilization on nvidia because they do not align memory, because they are doing an “indirect execution” thing and telling the driver that the wrong thing is being executed, and then doing this over and over nonstop.

This causes big pipeline bubbles, so your 4090 is mostly sitting there idle. So is a 7900XTX probably, but to a lesser extent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16ewupt/major_pr...

This was a problem with another title recently, where the consoles would tolerate some abuse of the api spec much better than PCs would. Maybe gollum.

I was really hoping they'd offer a space engineers type experience where you can fly your ship from space down to a planet and lan anywhere (with damage if you crash into buildings/terrain etc).

If it was fully free roam like all their other games it would've been so much better; their other games have so many little fun things to find even when you're in the middle of nowhere, lots of little stories created just by sticking a few props in a location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnl70CeiJP0 carhenge in FO4

I didn't buy it in the end, and idk if I will. Just makes me scared that'll screw up the next ES.

AMD definitely has a clear advantage in Starfield currently a 7900xtx is $1100 while a 4090 is $1600 and their performance is similar in the game.

Its tracks like this all the way down the line, will be interesting to see if that changes with drivers or game updates.

Some 7900 XTX models can be found for as low as $950.

AMD is close to release a new data center GPU, I wonder if price will be lower than H100. It seems PyTorch is fully supported, so it should be a good option for AI training.

What does this have to do with the article?

If their current retail tech is within spitting distance of NVidia's top of the line (as in the article) then their DC tech ought to be worth investigating.

Very interesting and deep analysis of GPU utilization.

I think I was hoping for more of a "space sim" from this game. One where I could fly into gas giants and get crushed, fly near the sun and fry to death, use a black hole for a gravity assist, that sort of thing. It didn't turn out that way at all, instead it's just a regular old quest driven Bethesda game with a generic sci-fi veneer.

If anyone has any cooler "space sim" type games to recommend, especially ones where you can play around with the crazy shit in space like magnetars, pulsars, black holes, etc... I would love to hear about it.

Elite dangerous probably, which I played a lot but its very grindy and lacking content, the space sim part is very well done though.

You can visit black holes and pulsars which can supercharge your ship for very long jumps. Many try to make it to Sgr A* at the center of the galaxy to see the massive black hole, quite a long journey even with 30 ly jumps. The milky way is modeled true to size and you can explore all of it, but its pretty empty.

Yup, I think this is the closest thing out there to what to OP is looking for. It is pretty open and empty, though.

Interesting, thank you. What types of simulated aspects are there in the game? Temperature, pressure, magnetism, gravity, etc? I was under the impression it was more of a space dogfighting type game but based on your comment it seems I may have been very wrong about this.

None of those.

The closest it gets to physical simulation is newtonian gravity (not that that really matters much when you're flying ships with practically reactionless thrust, just means some planets are slightly trickier to land on with thruster modules which haven't been upgraded) and ship movement when you turn the assist off that emulates a plane style flight model (although this also doesn't mean much in terms of realism because there's a speed cap, so you can't just keep thrusting and accelerating.

You can only interact with planets with no atmosphere or a thin one. But IIRC stars of all types and black holes can destroy your ship if you get too close). Some of the models for irl nebulae are cool, although unrealistically presented in the sense that they're blatantly visible. While the milky way is modeled to a realistic scale, the vast majority of it is empty and might as well not even exist.

> and might as well not even exist

As someone who flew around the galaxy literally, those systems exist, just too long to get there (and hard to get back in the inhabited part).

I'm not saying that they don't exist, but that they add so little (due to mostly just being nothing but another variation of the same handful of planet types with norhing to do there), that they might as well not exist.

It’s also absolutely amazing in VR. Totally changed the game for me, I find it unplayable without.

Elite Dangerous is a beautiful game with excellent voice acting. I eventually stopped playing it due to the ships getting prohibitively more expensive to replace when some pirates would out-maneuver my bigger and more expensive ships. As time went on it became more of a money grind. Too bad really, because I enjoyed the effort they put into the graphics and voice acting.

Kerbal Space Program 1 with a few mods is the best space sim of that sort ever. Someday KSP 2 might match it, but that’ll be a feat. KSP 1 is just within the solar system and KSP2 promises to do interstellar at some point, but to be honest that point feels about as far as the closest black hole.

KSP is unique in its “space” simulation, afaik near every other game made just treats space as a three dimensional flight sim without gravity and black backgrounds.

Thanks. Any particular mods to recommend? I've tried playing without mods many years ago but I remember it being extremely tough - I imagine mods would improve the user-friendliness significantly.

ummmm.... most of the mods just make it harder or more complicated :-/

Well, I don’t know about that - MechJeb makes it considerably easier to do almost anything.

MechJeb is the most important mod. It makes the game reasonable to play. Otherwise it’s just too difficult. I still recommend playing it in career mode and starting with original space flight rockets where you didn’t have a lot of automation. You get a good feel for the mechanics and it’s really not hard to get something into space. Then as you unlock the science nodes you get access to more advanced features including MechJeb, which is a part on your ship. It offers a lot of features like various autopilots, planning calculators, etc. The other mods add a lot of parts that are fun and become critical in extending game play. Something I found interesting in the game was how absurdly hard it is to actually hit the sun. The earth is moving so fast around the sun the amount of delta v (change in velocity) required to actually fall into the sun is really hard to build into a probe. So much for shooting our nukes into the sun.

MechJeb - makes the game much easier. Provides a lot of data and autopilot guidance features.

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/mechjeb

Near future * - a lot of engines and parts that aren’t far future tech but are current or near current engine tech

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-propu...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-solar

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-elect...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-space...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-explo...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-launc...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-const...

Interstellar - provides a lot of game play and features including in situ production

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/ksp-interstellar-...

Planetary base system - makes settling planets more fun

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/kerbal-planetary-...

Transfer planner - helpful in visualizing when to move between celestial bodies

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/transfer-window-p...

Thank you so much! Will definitely check these out.

The most important lesson is that getting to space is easy. The hard part is staying there.

After 100 or so hours you'll manage to dock in orbit. This is about as good as it gets. MechJeb trivialises this (IOW means makes the game playable if you don't want to play space randezvous simulation) but I strongly recommend doing it by hand if only just once.

I agree up to as good as it gets. Building a in orbit assembled explorer to fly to Jupiter, land probes on all the moons, and fly in the Jovian atmosphere in a plane, then land your explorer on a moon to form a permanent base is about as good as it gets.

But yeah my suggestion is to play career mode where MechJeb is in a science node. That way you play and awful lot of the game without it. Docking without assistance is definitely tricky, which makes it all so amazing that people actually did this in real space ships and their real life on the line without any automation.

Outer Wilds is the absolute best one.

Agreed. Unfortunately, I've already played it (and the DLC), and it's not really the type of game that's easy to replay since I already know all the secrets. Can't wait for Mobius Digital's next game.

Outer Wilds tops my personal list of "videogames you should play before you die."

I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of experience with videogames, even people that have never played a videogame. The beginning area reminds me of old school videogame tutorials, it's basically just a safe "sandbox" where you can experiment with all the mechanics and figure everything out.

If, incredibly, you haven't heard of this game yet, do yourself a favor, don't look anything up, take us on faith and just buy it and play it. It's even better if you go in blind.

Another recommendation for Outer Wilds, and echoing the parent: go in the game blind, get lost in the universe and take your time with the puzzles even if you are stuck. I wish I can wipe my mind and play it again!

> "I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of experience with videogames, even people that have never played a videogame."

While I absolutely agree with you that everyone should experience the game because it's amazing, it isn't the easiest game for non-gamers to get into. First person controls take a bit to get used to and folks who have gamed even casually for a while probably take that for granted. There are some "platforming" sections which require pretty good coordination that will likely frustrate most non-gamers to the point where they cannot complete the game. I would love to recommend this game to EVERYONE because it's so good, but you need at least decent FPS control skills for it to be approachable.

Any counter-recommendations?

Every time somebody says Outer Wilds, I think Outer Worlds, and that game could not have less exploration.

Yeah I think we all were. The fact that my stamina rate isn’t at all affected by whether I’m on Venus or the moon is incredible.

Yeah. The fact that you can't even fly your ship around a planet is astounding to me. The ship is basically nothing more than a glorified elevator.

It definitely is, though? My character runs out of stamina making the short run from base airlock to my ship at Red Mile, on a 2g planetoid. Compare that to a low g moon where I can run for ages.

I guess I would have imagined a much different mechanic. If my weight limit for carrying without fatiguing is 150 on Venus, it should be like 900 on the moon.

Inertia is still an issue regardless of local gravity.

Though I get your point, from a quality of life perspective it seems like it would be annoying as hell to be under constantly changing carry weight limits.

I very much appreciate the analytical depth of the article. I played Starfield for a total of six hours last weekend on my Xbox series X. It is reasonably good, at least so far. I'm from the very old school of gamers who were mesmerised by things like Kings Quest I and choplifter.

I'm quite sure I understood the very last paragraph, that the NVidia card does a slightly faster job at rendering the frames. I'll consider picking up one of those 4090 cards when it is clever enough to show me a city map in Starfield and draws less power than the flood lighting in a football stadium - and costs less than a year's food bills.

Dude, choplifter! Haven't thought about that game for a long time.

Why on god’s green earth does the game not have city maps? It’s like they never actually play tested in a city

I wrote this reply several times and scrapped all of my drafts. In an inspired moment I came up with this ridiculous conclusion/theory. That Bethesda intend to release city maps as paid DLC - and in the mean time not having those maps helps to increase the number of Steam and XBox game pass "hours played" stats.

Or maybe they just forgot, I mean, that can happen.

I wonder if no maps makes things "feel bigger" (in the same way that streaming services seem unwilling to just give you a list of what they have).

Stray's first city felt like an endless labyrinth when I was ~~playing~~ getting lost in it, but looked quite compact once I found a map outside the game.

That could be it (or part of) the thought process behind the decision, assuming it was in fact a deliberate move. If I'm to have a bash at listing the possible reasons as to why there aren't city maps in Starfield, and in no particular order, here goes:

- Scope creep: The desired implementation was so ambitious that they couldn't complete it on time, and didn't want to release something that didn't fulfil the ultimate goal (e.g. a rotatable 3D map, like the ones in the Doom games from when Bethesda took over id software). Maybe they wanted to also track NPCs and add a whole layer of trackability depending on some skill or ability. Maybe they want to help you track resources which are needed for the various crafting mechanisms which appear on the map once you've encountered them (and before you explicitly track a particular recipe or research goal).

- Unfinished locations: The possibility that they intend to make topological changes to one or more of the cities in the future, or that the cities are not yet done. The cities are hand-crafted, the rest is "tiled" using handcrafted elements and procedural generation.

- Resources and priorities: They descoped it altogether to prioritise polishing the rest of the game as much as possible and anticipated that they will get complaints, and respond to said complaints by promising that it is something they will add at some point in the future because "we love hearing from you and need this feedback to help improve the game" etc.

I honestly don't think they forgot about it or that they had/have no intention of implementing it. I think they simply did not have enough time to get it the way they needed it to be on time for release. There might be some unfinished dream city maps implementation tucked away in the current release which just needs to be switched on once it is ready. It could be that they have "something" going on in there but they're not sure about whether or not it will sit well with their future ambitions for the game.

My bet is that they didn't have enough time to complete their maps implementation for the release and that there exists some indecision as to what they would consider to be an acceptable implementation. Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all their resources and research capabilities on creating all the things we need for the year 2330. Just no binoculars, rovers, Google Maps and interplanetary video conferencing and email.

> Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all their resources and research capabilities on creating all the things we need for the year 2330. Just no binoculars, rovers, Google Maps and interplanetary video conferencing and email.

Nothing but landline phones and voice recorders. The landline phones are huge panel things that look like something from the 1970s (and/or Star Wars).

I think the lack of maps is heavily dependent on that weird tech baseline they were trying to hit. They seemed to have wanted "60s/70s tech plus FTL" and the Constellation 70s ideal of a smart watch (a space "diver's watch") to be nearly as "diegetic" for game UI as the Fallout "pipboy" as the grand central UI for everything. But then they waffled and included a ton of menus and couldn't decide how much to outright own that they seemed to have wanted a retro-future vision rather than true futurism. (But also possibly disagreed on that internally and never quite decided what they were trying to do with the tech level. It feels inconsistent from outside.)

It's very hard for me not to compare here to Outer Worlds with a similar team making similar technology decisions but actually owning them and following them to more absurd lengths. I feel like Outer Worlds had a lot more fun with its technology decisions because it knew it wanted to truly own "Fallout but Space Travel". Starfield has so many moments where it acts like it wants to be "Fallout but Space Travel" but then pulls some punches and just absolutely waffles. Maybe some of it is because they also wanted to add Cyberpunk elements from a decade or three later (the Ryujin storyline, for instance) and sticking to just one retro-future alone wasn't interesting enough for (some of) the team.

Had Starfield truly owned 60s/70s retro future maybe there would have been Alien/Aliens-style maps with all those cool, swooping simple green vectors (more Tron-like perhaps than the "pipboy" 40s/50s CRT maps). There's a lot to mine in real world NASA moon maps from the 60s, but those were all paper and many hand-drawn elements. (Relatedly, Outer Worlds gave us fun "paper" tourist maps as a part of their retro playfulness.) I think in waffling about whether or not Starfield was retro-future they couldn't figure out how maps would even look, because they couldn't decide on (or perhaps agree on?) the appropriate tech level in the first place, and gave up for "story reasons" that they couldn't fit in maps.

I don't recall Fallout or Skyrim having in-game city maps, so it's par for the course with Bethesda.

Fallout had local maps everywhere you go and they were quite detailed.

I just pulled up a save game and you're absolutely right. I replayed the game last year and for some reason this feature just didn't come to mind.

> That Bethesda intend to release city maps as paid DLC

They have said they will release them free, just hadn't gotten them completed.

That's not what I've seen, it appears they've said they'd "love to do them", with to mention of price:

https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/17019770714659883...

Because people buy AAA games with no second thought.

This game is objectively an underbaked game, but it’s by Bethesda so it’s going to make its RoI with no real effort.

I definitely did, but I feel a bit duped. I think they sort of let us imagine what the game could be and didn’t correct us when we were way off base.

Underbaked is a good way of describing it. Old fashioned or arcane are also good ways of describing it. It has an almost gleeful disregard of modern “quality of life” approaches to game design insofar as it almost feels punitive. It’s like they filtered out the best parts out of other bethesda games (open exploration, random encounters and events), and amped up the worst parts (disjointed areas, loading screens). Most missions, too, are just mindless professions of “fetch this thing/talk to or kill this person”. Having just played Tears of the Kingdom and its breathtaking level of open-endedness, this game felt like playing with a playskool toy after playing with a giant set of legos.

I just booted up cyberpunk 2077 today because the update is coming soon and I hadn’t touched it in a while so I wanted to see what was what. That game is already like 2 years old and it still feels 10 years ahead of Starfield.

Yeah I ended up getting it for free with my GPU and I was fascinated by how…behind it is from even some indie games?

Like, Dave the Diver has more exploration than Starfield and they’re not even comparable.

I'm going to guess that it was an attempt to address some fans critism that their newer games were too "hand holding" compared to their older titles. Not saying it was a good design decision but that may have been the thought process.

There are so many questions with this game. I think something happened during development. It's bizarre. I played for hours and kept wondering what's missing and then it hit me, there's no radiant AI in the game. What the hell? Bethesda's engine is known for 2 things 1) object permanence and 2) radiant AI. How in the world did such a core part of creation engine get cut from starfield? That's just insane.

> Kings Quest I

Heretic. Everyone knows that Kings Quest III is the metric by which all other games are measured! I'll forgive you this time though because to heir is human.

I played all of them. KQ1 was my first experience with a PC. I miss those days, I do. Absence makes the heart...

I got into computer gaming late. I got a Tandy 1000 in 1995 (when I was 12) which launched my love for computer games and KQ3 was one of my first adventures. Being voracious reader of fantasy novels at the time, being able to play as a poor abused apprentice to a wizard was something I'd never experienced before. Collecting spell ingredients and searching for an escape was so much more engaging than the Sonic and Mario games I'd played before. That and Starflight will always hold a special place in my heart because they allowed me to explore games in a way that I didn't realize existed based on my experience at the time with NES and Genesis games. There was just so much more depth relative to most console games I'd experienced by that point.

Starflight is probably still ahead of its time. It does such an amazing job of capturing that feeling of being an explorer in a strange universe trying to unravel a mystery against a perceived time limit - though there is none, even if you take forever and Arth gets hit by the anomaly, the game happily continues on.

The first time you discover the 'special planet' (avoiding spoilers for a 30 year old game lol) after slowly piecing together those clues, and then eventually understanding what it all means. That sort of curve ball, but one that makes absolutely perfect sense for everything you've learned to date, to say nothing of the extreme moral ambiguity in what you eventually do (and have been doing) - it gave a feeling like nothing I've ever experienced again in 30 years of gaming.

If anybody hasn't played Starflight, I couldn't recommend it more. IMO, the version on the Sega Genesis is the best - and easily obtainable with an emulator.

Heretic: quest for glory importing your character from one version to the next was absolutely my favorite. Too bad these types of games are no more.

>I'll consider picking up one of those 4090 cards when it [...] draws less power than the flood lighting in a football stadium

The RTX 4090 is actually very efficient. The only card more efficient than it is the RTX 4080. Every single AMD card is less efficient than it is.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-7700-x...

Wich version of the game did they use for their tests? At launch it was very bad, but it got a little bit better with their latest update

It's a decent game overall, but it's a Bethesda game, I expected something much better

I feel like Bethesda became a shadow of its past, I don't know if the Oblivion devs are still there, I would guess not, wich might explain the issues I have with the game, both technically (bugs/performance) and gameplay wise (shallow/simplistic combat, poor AI, surface level RPG elements)

With this new IP I wished they'd have learned from their past games and offered something with more punch.. the game is currently at ~72% positive review on steam [1], they definitely missed the mark

I hope they'll do better with TES 6, the lack of true open world in Starfield doesn't inspire confidence tbh

[1] - https://steamdb.info/app/1716740/

It feels like several of the legendary old school RPG shops all switched to playing it safe around the same time. Blizzard, Bioware, Bethesda.. It's a bummer if you grew up playing their games and still have fond, visceral memories of how they made you feel at the time.

Fortunately companies like Larian are picking up the slack.

I just feel like they are going for something slightly different with Starfield. While they all share a certain DNA, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield all have different areas of emphasis.

I would suspect the next Elder Scrolls would lean heavier into the RPG elements and I hope the next Fallout puts more of an emphasis on VATs. The poor shooting in Fallout 3 actually made VATS a requirement that was really rewarding when you got it right.

It's more or less exactly what I expected at this point. 90% of effort/resources into adding more quests and locations, 10% into brushing up surface-level graphics stuff and jiggling the minigames a bit, 0% into "fundamentals" like core gameplay and artistic polish.

The only thing Bethesda has been ambitious about this past decade is content volume.

I fully agree with your assessment. In terms of annoyances, so far the only complaints I have after six hours of play on the XSX would be:

- (Bug) Enemies in the cookie-cutter "abandoned" facilities being able to shoot me through the very thick airlocks.

- I keep getting kicked out when I try to rush the airlock and get into the facility. At which point the magic weapons get me through the doors (even when shut).

- "Abandoned" always means occupied by bad guys who have displaced the good guys who were doing research (or other things) there. So call such places "reoccupied" or something. There are space baddies there, it's not abandoned.

- We have spaceships which can jump light years at a time. Can we please have binoculars, or did humanity forget how to craft those in this universe?

- I guess when Earth got completely destroyed by humanity, so did the ancient art of cartography. Or maps of cities occupied by humans need space subscriptions which are just too damned expensive and/or have too much advertising going on in them.

- Having to commit to a skill (like lockpicking (security?) before being able to try it out.

- We can't just email someone to have a conversation with them. We must travel light years and then find them without the help of...a map.

Still, I'll probably end up sinking more hours than I want to count into this game.

I think all of those issues you listed were absolutely present in the Morrowind/Oblivion period. Really I don’t think it’s that Bethesda is a shadow of its former self. I think it’s that Bethesda still is its former self. The industry and our expectations have moved, but they really haven’t.

i feel the same way.

starfield feels and plays like a game from the ps4 era. those loading screens gave it away in the first few minutes.

> "It's a decent game overall, but it's a Bethesda game, I expected something much better"

You're right. It's a Bethesda game. Which means it's full of bugs and easy to fix issues that Bethesda will completely ignore because they rely on the modding community to fix their garbage code. Very few other game makers have communities dedicated to fixing their bugs via mods. Buggy Bethesda games is basically a meme at this point. The Girlfriend Reviews take is pretty much on point here for most Bethesda games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEMxZdM-2bI

> While Starfield gameplay appears relatively bug free Not the case for me.

The game is unplayable, same issue as for folks in that thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16bm1f7/audio_cu...

GPU: GTX 2080 Ti

CPU: threadripper 3950x

RAM: 64Gb

Game installed on SSD

FWIW, I have the slightly bigger brother of your system and encountered no audio issues so far. In fact, after 26+ hours of playtime, I've only had one crash and zero bugs I could notice (except maybe NPCs spawning on top of tables or silly things like that).

GPU 3080Ti CPU 5950X RAM 64Gb and an NVMe drive with the OS and the games

Playing on a i7700k with 6700xt, 32gb ram, NVME SSD and it plays fine on high at 4k (62% resolution scale). 30 fps in heavy cities up to 65 fps in enclosed builds and caves etc.

I am cpu bound I think, pretty old cpu. Play it through sunshine/moonlight on my Mac even since the PC is relegated to garage.

Its a heavy game and targets only 30 fps on consoles unfortunate to see the audio glitching for some, I have not yet experienced it.

Running a 1080ti and no issues so far (nvme, 16gb ram, AMD 5600x)

if you installed via steam, check if the ultra-wide resolution fix will help - if you're trying to run in 4k. The 2080 ti has 12GB of vram, right? This is a mod that allows 2550x1440 or whatever it is to display properly, and yes, you will get letterboxing (or whatever it's called) - but it may run and then you'll know it is something about 4k on your hardware/software combo.

if you're not trying to run 4k, there is a vague possibility that the number of threads is hampering your ability to play. I know, i don't really believe it myself, but lots of people mentioning that trying to disable SMT (or whatever) helped.

FTR: RTX 3090, Ryzen 5950x, 128GB, game installed on sata SSD, and never had a graphical issue related to the hardware.

I’ve had issues on my machine (32 cores) with too many hardware threads on games before, but they just die when setting up a thread pool on startup. Everything is fine with Starfield though so I’m suspicious that this is a real problem (unless it only shows up at 64 cores when Windows starts forcing NUMA groups).

GP said "threadripper 3950x (sic)"; there is a threadripper 3960x which is 48 threads, so potentially, since we both play starfield with 32 threads - that could be the issue.

The ryzen 3950x is 32 thread though, which is why i put "sic" above.

It may be choking on too large of a threadcount. By default Starfield creates as many workerthreads as what you have cores. And it scales really badly. For your setup it likely makes 32 threads like it does on my 16 core Zen4.

I limited mine to the same as what the consoles have and it made things quite a bit smoother. You can try adding these to your StarfieldCustom.ini

[General]

uMaxPrimaryJobThreads=8

uMaxSecondaryJobThreads=8

I wouldn’t describe Starfield as Skyrim in space. I’ve watched my girlfriend play it for hours and days now and I would describe it as Fallout in space. Which is pretty cool.

IMO the quest lines and the powers are very Skyrim'y. Combat is undeniably Fallout without vats, which I think is a good thing.

so you thought it was more todd howard’s nostalgic sciencey game in space, less todd howard’s dark fantasy game in space?

I have heard it described as Fallout without the depression. Definitely a more positive setting.

Now hold on one second - "Fallout without the depression".

Here I thought I was one of the only people who felt increasingly depressed playing Fallout 4. It eventually led to me not playing it anymore. I couldn't shake the feeling that every decision, every choice, every path was bad, some more than others... and it just was, depressing.

Perhaps brilliant story telling to instill that feeling - no other game has had that affect on me.

I've mentioned this to friends who have also played Fallout 4 and none really could relate to that feeling.

Well here is a whole thread of people who feel similar:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16ap6ol/starfiel...

People have problems...

I don’t relate, I found it really relaxing and optimistic. Sometimes I wish we could live in a Fallout world if we could get there without all the death and destruction.

I like that the "dungeons" are less dark/dreadful. They remind me of mass effect.

Funny, I had the exact opposite impression. It's like Fallout, but without the over-the-top humor to soften the grimdark crapsack universe where most everyone outside a major city wants to kill you on sight.

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