Even the fastest SSDs you can buy might not be good enough for Starfield which makes upgrading your PC a little harder

[Windows Central]

The more PC gamers play with Starfield the more gremlins are showing their face, and it seems even the fastest SSDs on the planet might not be able to handle it.

Even the fastest SSDs you can buy might not be good enough for Starfield which makes upgrading your PC a little harder : Read more

 

[fjtorres5591]

Are they using DirectStorage?
The game is clearly optimized...for AMD.
Digital Forge already proved that so the logical take is the game was developed for XBOX's flavor of DirectX and PC got a port.

Not too different from what PC and XBOX gamers get with games using PS5 as the target when, somehow, the stronger hardware pergorms no better (and on ocassion worse) than the weakest because of the code approaches used. Sort of "most favored nation" software development.

Not fair but economically driven in both cases.
STARFIELD *is* optimized for both platforms but "some platforms are more equal". As in it absolutely positively needed to run well on XBOX (and Cloud) from day one, while PC gamers are (sadly) used to "bugthesda" and using mods from day two and "can wait on bug fixes".
Priorities.

 

[Looming Dementia]

I just installed the game, and off I went. The SSD I installed the game to reads at about 5 GB/sec, nowhere near the fastest SSD on the market. I'm pretty sure that if I'd installed it on my slightly slower OS drive, it would perform admirably.

What is the writer of the article talking about? I bet he installed the SSDs into a laptop with a sub-optimal CPU or something along those lines.

Just stick in a middling SSD, and don't push the settings above what your hardware can handle. You'll be fine. I stuck a middling SSD into a system with an RTX 4080 and a very fast hyperthreaded 12-core CPU. Maxed every setting with FSR 2 enabled at 75%, and I run through New Atlantis at 4K 70+ FPS, with a very good 99% FPS and zero visible hitches.

The writer of this article is doing something very, very wrong.

 

[fjtorres5591]

I just installed the game, and off I went. The SSD I installed the game to reads at about 5 GB/sec, nowhere near the fastest SSD on the market. I'm pretty sure that if I'd installed it on my slightly slower OS drive, it would perform admirably.

What is the writer of the article talking about? I bet he installed the SSDs into a laptop with a sub-optimal CPU or something along those lines.

Just stick in a middling SSD, and don't push the settings above what your hardware can handle. You'll be fine. I stuck a middling SSD into a system with an RTX 4080 and a very fast hyperthreaded 12-core CPU. Maxed every setting with FSR 2 enabled at 75%, and I run through New Atlantis at 4K 70+ FPS, with a very good 99% FPS and zero visible hitches.

The writer of this article is doing something very, very wrong.

Just curious: Intel or AMD CPU?
RAM?
The game *is* CPU bound.

 

[Looming Dementia]

Just curious: Intel or AMD CPU?
RAM?
The game *is* CPU bound.

Yeah, I know that it chews up a CPU that's below recommended specs. The listed required CPU is NOT enough, really. Not even close, for any game settings.

It's an AMD ... uhhhhhh. It isn't an X3D. Can't remember the model, and I'm not at home to look. It's a 12/24-core with a max clock speed just short of 6 GHz. Plenty of cache in a CPU like that, of course.

Will an Intel wafer with similar numbers really run worse than what I have? I would think perhaps it might run slightly higher in terms of utilization, but it should still be well within tolerances, right?

I would think that the Nvidia GPU would be more of an issue. The drivers aren't great, yet (but not as bad as the Intel ARC drivers). We should see serious improvement over the next couple of months of driver updates.

I have 32 GB of DDR5. I was contemplating 64, but no games are going to utilize more than 32, for at least the next 6 or 7 years. I'll be building a new PC around that time, when the 70-series comes out.

And say, if an Intel CPU makes the game run much worse, we shouldn't be blaming the SSD, right?

 

[fjtorres5591]

Yeah, I know that it chews up a CPU that's below recommended specs. The listed required CPU is NOT enough, really. Not even close, for any game settings.

It's an AMD ... uhhhhhh. It isn't an X3D. Can't remember the model, and I'm not at home to look. It's a 12/24-core with a max clock speed just short of 6 GHz. Plenty of cache in a CPU like that, of course.

Will an Intel wafer with similar numbers really run worse than what I have? I would think perhaps it might run slightly higher in terms of utilization, but it should still be well within tolerances, right?

I would think that the Nvidia GPU would be more of an issue. The drivers aren't great, yet (but not as bad as the Intel ARC drivers). We should see serious improvement over the next couple of months of driver updates.

I have 32 GB of DDR5. I was contemplating 64, but no games are going to utilize more than 32, for at least the next 6 or 7 years. I'll be building a new PC around that time, when the 70-series comes out.

And say, if an Intel CPU makes the game run much worse, we shouldn't be blaming the SSD, right?

Dunno. But the DIGITAL FOUNDRY video showed significant differences with AMD doing on CPU and GPU and Intel doing really poorly on the GPU side.

Hard to tell what is going on other than AMD being *very* helpful and Intel and Nvidia...not as much.

(There's a reason XBOXes run on AMD while the original ran on Intel and Nvidia. The..kind...explanation at the time--360 era--was that Intel and Nvidia saw XBOX as a client and AMD and IBM as a partner. That might have changed...)