You heard him 4090 users, upgrade to a more powerful GPU.
Damn this is a pathetic response. He could’ve said “We’ve tried our best to make it as polished as possible before launch, and are working towards further optimising it to give you the best experience, wherever you play”. Even if they did jackshit, it would not come out as condescending and snarky. Maybe he wasn’t prepared for a tough question on the spot right at the beginning of the interview, but it does show how he thinks about his games. In his mind, the game running at all on PC is optimised enough.
I am not saying he’s bad for not making Creation Engine super optimised engine on this planet, I’m saying he’s bad for not acknowledging it is currently most demanding engine despite looking merely half as good as Cyberpunk 2077 or idk Arkham Knight.
It’s not even about graphics alone.
They’re clearly building their games in an extremely inefficient way. Starfield does not have anything going on in it that other games with much lower requirements also have done.
You see evidence of this in their previous games. One of the major performance issues with Fallout 4 for example, was that instead of building their cities in performant ways, they literally plonked every building as an individual asset into the world which thrashed the CPU for no reason. Modders just had to merge them all into one model to significantly improve performance. Their games are full of things like this and Starfield will be no different.
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.
Nah the Boston performance was terrible in vanilla. The precombination fixes made huge performance improvements. There were issues with mods breaking precombined meshes but that was a separate issue.
Why would he? Todd hates everyone who plays his games and cares only about separating money from pockets. Fallout 76 made that quite clear to everyone.
If he gave a standard appeasing PR statement without following it up at all, that would somehow be preferable? This may be snarky, but at least you know what to expect.
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.
The missing part is that the user with a 4090 complaining had a CPU from 2017 🥴
What’s a CPU bottleneck? I have the magic gpu
Yeah, I’m not buying that either. I’m on a 2014 i7 and a 3060 playing on ultra. My sole issue was not running on an SSD which I resolved yesterday. That kid is clearly playing on a potato and lying.
At what framerate?
Lying at any framerate is still lying.
I’m shocked at home many PC users are still running HDDs given that SSDs have been standard ok consoles for three years now.
They’ve pretty much been standard for gaming and containing the os on PC for 5 if not more. HDDs are still good for storage, but only luddites and people trying to save money in the stupidest way would have their games on them.
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
Considering that this thing runs great on a Series S (which is CPU-heavy, but with a weak graphics card) that makes so much more sense.
Lol, dude used up all the money to get a GPU.
Gotta love the Bethesda fanboys upvoting this one cherry picked comment. They’re are like 70 comments in there with all different combos of system specs complaining about performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCGD9dT12C0
Get a new game engine, Todd. Bethesda owns id Software. id Tech is right where.
Exactly this. It was only two generations ago when idTech was an open world engine, id can and have made it to do whatever they want and to suggest that despite Bethesda money (let alone MICROSOFT money) id couldn’t make a better engine with similar development workflows as Creation is just dishonest to suggest.
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.
There are no “levels of simulation systems” in Starfield. NPCs don’t even have schedules in this game, they literally just stand around in the same spot 24/7.
It’s still keeping track of lots of variables across a big play space at any time regardless of NPC schedules.
They tried that once with Oblivion and clearly it didn’t add enough to the game and players experience to return to.
They tried that once with Oblivion
They advertised that with Oblivion’s AI but never delivered on half the claims.
Go look at the pre-release claims of the Radiant AI and what was actually delivered.
“keeping track of lots of variables” doesn’t cost CPU time though, since nothing that isn’t on the same map as you is ever relevant for anything. Their engine just fucking sucks.
Keeping track of variables doesn’t use CPU time? Ok man. I’m all for hating on Bethesda’s shitty engine but that’s just not true. At the very least it does track what NPCs are doing off screen which is how they end up at your ship when you tell them to go there. They will actually walk to your ship if you don’t get there first.
On the other hand it’s basically guaranteed that Bethesda spent zero effort optimizing that. I bet it’s the same code they ran for Skyrim.
Starfield has less simulation than Fallout 4, it just has more (mostly empty) maps.
You are completely talking out of your ass.
You realise custom engines are built for specific game types right? iD Tech is great for creating high fedelity FPS games with linear levels and little environment interactivity. That’s not what Bethesda make though.
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.
As far as I know, Bethesda are unusual in modern Devs in that they have a small team for the size of game they make, but they have strong retention of staff so have huge amounts of institutional knowledge about how they do things. Shifting to a new engine would basically mean starting from scratch on a company level. Unlike Ubisoft or Activison, they can’t just throw several thousend Devs at a game to brute force the development either.
But that’s their biggest problem. There’s no reason for them to have a small unchanging team. It’s very very obvious that they never get an influx of new ideas. Starfield feels like it was made in 2016 and the optimization effort is comically bad. The writing is still mostly boring, campy and naive like it was written by a 15 year old Mormon. The facial animations are incrementally better than fallout but still noticeably worse than much older games like Witcher 3. I could go on.
It’s not a bad game at all but it could’ve been so much better if Bethesda execs weren’t greedy cheapasses and the dev team was open to changing their process.
This why Bethesda needs to be criticized instead of constantly getting fellated by fanboys. ES6 will be an outdated mess because Bethesda never sees any feedback except over the top praise for half-assing their games.
Fanboys downvote you but you are right, even if I love the fallout franchise, the same gameplay loop, the same engines, potato faces in 2023, outdated animations… etc, right now I would prefer Microsoft to force obsidian to take care of the next fallout, and ban Todd Howard for ever putting one foot in the dev took, even in the building. He can go fuck himself and his shit engine.
ID tech is nowhere near flexible enough for something like Starfield or even Skyrim. It’s partially the reason why it’s so efficient. It simply isn’t fit for the task.
And the Bethesda developers are intimately familiar with Creation Engine, achieving the same level of productivity with something new will take a long time. Switching the engine is not an easy thing.
Not to say that Creation Engine isn’t a cumbersome mess. It has pretty awful performance, stability and is full of bugs, but on the other hand it’s extremely flexible which has allowed its games to have massive mod communities.
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 know they don’t want to switch, but it would be worth it to make the swap to something like unreal, even if it takes a few years of customization to get the open world stuff right. Creation Engine just feels so old.
Do you guys not have better PCs?
I understood that reference.
I have a 3080 ti, and a 12700k, and 32 gigs of ddr5, and a 2 terabyte ssd. It runs great for me. I don’t understand the problem. /s
So, this system runs it fine? Good to know. I was worried that my computer would not be able to run it smoothly, but now no worries at all.
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.
Sorry mate but 35fps on a 3080 with FSR is just objectively bad performance.
Starfield is not doing anything in terms of graphics or gameplay that other games that run 3-4 times as well aren’t doing.
That’s because they’re CPU limited, mate.
Easy 1440p60 on ultra everything with no scaling on my 3090. Frequently up in the 80-90 FPS range. This game runs fine. It’s not a “teetering mess” as you say.
What exactly is it doing that an 8086k is CPU limited to 35fps?
Completed some testing on my end, using intels PresentMon and sitting at 35fps average in New Atlantis my GPU busy is pegged at about 99% of the frame time, so nothing really.
I do get a bit of a CPU limitation when it’s raining, but nothing significant, dropped to about 30fps.
Trying at 1440p with the same settings as the 3090 above got me around 50fps, 1440p is almost half the pixels of 80% of 4k as well, so that’s not helping my GPU much!
I’d really not expect the performance difference between a 3090 and a 3080 to be that large, and the only difference I can think of in our systems is the CPU. (5800X3D vs 8086k)
New Atlantis is a smooth 60+ fps with every setting maxed out at 1440p.
Considering that CPU is less powerful than what’s in the Xbox Series S, which does 1080p30, I’m not at all surprised they’re getting a similar frame rate.
If this was a “teetering mess” you would have heard it in the Gamers Nexus benchmarks. Steve says nothing to this end, and the game benches predictably across the spectrum of hardware tested.
for me the game runs pretty well with ~90+ fps on high and activated fsr2.
5800x 3D, 64 gigs of ram and a 6900XT I shot cheap during the great gpu collapse. And by the looks of the game this seems pretty reasonable to me.
AMD users are having a better time with it, unsurprisingly. I wish I hadn’t gone for Nvidia but too late for that.
I think there wil be patches and some updates to NVIDIAs shitty driver that will fix things in the future :) Otherweise yeah maybe get an AMD GPU next time, don’t fall for the NVIDIA Marketing. Using Radeons since the 9800 pro Bundle with Half Life 2 and never had any issues with them or their drivers.
Hopefully. I’ve always been more of an AMD/ATI fan, but for this laptop the deal worked out to be better with an Nvidia card. But next time I’m not settling for it. AMD CPU and GPU is the way to go. Especially because I’m trying to daily on Linux now and the driver side is much much nicer with AMD.
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…
Hey at least you don’t have to upgrade for a while, could probably run it for another yr if todd is generous
You had me in the first sentence, and then I realized it was sarcasm. 🤪 I’m running a similar rig, but it’s primarily for rendering work, etc., so for juuust a second there, I wondered if it was falling behind. 😅🤓
I don’t know what your problem is, guys. When Skyrim was released, NVIDIA had GT 5xx series. Skyrim barely run at 40 FPS on Ultra on 1080p on a GT 560. Today, according to Gamers Nexus, Starfield runs at 60 FPS average on GTX 4060.
So, Starfield is better optimised than Skyrim was. Go buy a new GPU.
Yeah, we optimized. We didn’t do it well, but it happened!
I’m a game developer and I’m ashamed by this.
When chip production will halt because of the climate, you will see programmers optimizing their code again.
Jeez I hope this economy crashes.
people really need to put the nostalgia googles down…back in the days nobody played Crysis with full details and a steady framerate.
You were in 1024x768 and turned everything down just to play the game with barely 30fps and you know what, it was still dope as fuck. So yeah guys get used to lower your settings or to upgrade your rig and if you don’t want to do that get a xbox
Crysis was built by a company specialising in building a high fidelity engine. It was, by all accounts, meant primarily as a tech demo. This is absolutely not the case with Starfield - first, the game doesn’t look nearly good enough for that compared to Crysis, and second it’s built on an engine that simply can’t do a lot of the advanced stuff.
The game could be playable on max settings on many modern computers if it was optimised properly. It isn’t.
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 ;)
You don’t have to be a game dev to see that games that came out before Starfield look and perform better. If you bought the game and you enjoy it, that’s all fine and I won’t make fun of you for it, but let’s not defend what is an obvious point of incompetence on Bethesda’s side.
why buying starfield when it is on gamepass 😅
And buddy, I’ve been playing Bethesda Games since Daggerfall and believe me, Starfield is a fucking polished diamond compared to their old good games and compared to their latest shitshows like fallout 4 and fallout 76…
I’m not your buddy
You’re comparing Bethesda games to Bethesda games, which we all know are buggy messes. Starfield falls short of my expectations for what a polished diamond looks like.
okay not-buddy 😂 I think we are also pretty much done here, since I dont see any point in discussing this any further with you. So byeeee and have a pleasent day not playing Starfield I guess.
Will do
sure mister gamedev, please continue to tell more on how an engine you clearly worked on, should run…
I can easily compare between what different game companies do. Why are you acting like I need to be a developer on a game to criticise that game?
I dont say that Starfield is a well optimised game and performance will get better with upcoming patches.
Todd could have said so. He didn’t. Why?
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
I never stated this. I simply said: comparing Starfield and Crysis is deliberately disingenuous, because Crysis was fundamentally meant to break boundaries, which Starfield doesn’t do.
Oh and also other games did not run that well like you maybe remember ;)
Okay, what’s the argument here? Do you think I say for those games “well, you’re not Bethesda, so I’m fine with you not running well”?
you don’t have to know the internals of the engine. you just need some basic deduction powers.
does it look it look good compared to other AAA games? no
does it run fast? no
ergo. the engine is crap.
the same thing happened to cd projekt red but they ditched their engine after the cyberpunk fiasco. they will just pay epic
I don’t know why they keep using that piece of shit engine, Microsoft should order them to format every PC and start again with UE5, the engine that it’s actually next gen
does it look it look good compared to other AAA games? no
well I beg to differ on that, but it’s quiete a subjective topic right ;)
does it run fast? no ergo. the engine is crap.
Again very subjective, very dependend on your hardware and also a pretty dumb conclusion, since an engine has more qualities then to run “fast”.
I already mentioned in this thread, the games runs quite well for me and I would call fps in the range from 80 to 124 quite fast for a Bethesda Open World Game. So what do we do now with our subjective oppinions 🤔
well you can put your “not in my computer” opinion in your ass. widespread benchmarks by established gaming journalists show good computers struggling.
ok 😀
complains about others wearing nostalgia goggles
calls Cysis dope
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.
Story is meh but lots of people will say how the open ended nature of Crysis was fun and a pity that it was removed for a more linear CoD style in Crysis 2
Wtf Crysis 1 was awesome… At least the first part without the aliens… And not because of the graphics
Except this time even with 1024x768 and lowest settings you can barely break 60 FPS due to the huge CPU overhead.
And that’s with a Ryzen 7 5800X.
I have the same processor and no issues. 1440p 80-125 fprs, high Details, 100% and FSR2
In New Atlantis City outdoors? Mine barely stays above 60 FPS, sometimes dipping under.
yep. 70 fps in the worst case
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.
There will always be that game that pushes the boundaries between current gen and next gen. Sometimes even more. Crysis is the perfect example of the past. Starfiels seems to do a decent job right now even if it’s probably not even close to what Crysis did. When people spend a lot of money we feel entitlement, thats only natural. No one did anything wrong. So no need to point a finger anywhere.
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.
You seem to have missed the part where I wrote that Starfield is probably not even close to pushing the boundaries in the same way that Crysis did. So I can’t do much explaining in detail about that it is.
Honestly, what do you expect someone to say when asked a question like that? There’s no answer there.
“we have worked a lot on PC performance. wanted to reach performance parity with consoles for release on similar hardware and we achieved that, However, our teams will continue working on improvements and integrating technologies like fsr and dlss in the future. “
Umm… honesty. Games used to run on the bleeding edge of performance. Not Bethesda games but just games in general. Now the release half broken blatant cash grabs and think no ones gonna call them out for it.
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.
Seriously? Just say that we’re always trying to optimize our games and we’ll continue working on it. It’s such an easy question to tackle. I refuse to believe you can’t see that. People just think Bethesda is above criticism for some inane reason.
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?”
"We optimized it for the very high end of computers. The issue is your wallet."Kek mf’ing w
With my experiences playing the game with an unsupported GPU and getting a solid 60 fps still as long as no NPCs are in the vicinity, I don’t think it’s the GPU side of things that needs optimization. It’s whatever uses the CPU.
It’s the CPU. I had to throttle the process to be able to able. This game is a CPU ressource hog
deleted by creator
It could be optimized better for intel. They have had that issue in the past.
Though… I limit my voltage to keep it from shooting up to 95c from their latest firmware updates (AMD cpus push themselves to the thermal limit intentionally), I kinda wonder if that is having an effect. It’s never been a problem before, however.
First game to just have constant crashes on my seven year old RX480, which is great since otherwise the game runs completely fine. Support doesn’t seem to want my crash reports either, I guess in Todds world, I should just throw the thing in the trash for a game that does literally nothing special in the tech department.
To be fair, that GPU is long past EoL. Even the 7xx series doesn’t receive support/driver updates anymore.
RX480 is an AMD card that came out 7 years ago, not the GTX 480.
Maybe he thought you typoed RTX since nvidia uses that now instead of GTX. But there is no RYX480 so idk
Their idea of optimization in console was to cap the frame rate to 30, even on the Series X. So you can wonder what that means for PC
Since negative opinions travel fast, I’m just gonna say my GPU is actually below the minimum requirements, though admittedly I upgraded CPU last year. The game’s minimum is a GTX 1070 TI, I just have a regular GTX 1070.
In my case, it’s doing a LOT of dynamic resolution and object blurring nonsense to get the game to run smoothly, but it does run smoothly. I get to see the character faces during conversations, I can see what I’m doing, there’s no hitching, etc. New Atlantis looks ugly, but that might change if I get a new GPU.
