Starfield will be locked to 30 FPS on Xbox. Todd Howard explains why.

[Windows Central]

Bethesda's Todd Howard has confirmed that Starfield will be locked to 30 FPS on Xbox consoles. Here's why.

Starfield will be locked to 30 FPS on Xbox. Todd Howard explains why. : Read more

 

[CartographerS]

If there’s some headroom I wonder if they would consider a 40 fps mode. A decent amount of Xbox owners have 120hz screens where something like that would work, and 40fps is noticeably smoother than 30fps.

 

[Hanley Gibbons]

I'm just gonna say it. This is some bullshit.

We have variable refresh rate; uncap the framerate.

I have a 4K120 Hz TV with VRR and I would rather play it at 1080p60 than 4K30 any day of the week, as would many seasoned gamers.

 

[darknight765]

Is this dude not capable of reading the room? Give us options. If you want you 4k max settings at 30 fps, cool. But why can the people who want to play at 1440p or 1080p 60fps have a mode? I'm willing to bet you are already doing dynamic or reconstructed 4k with heavy motion blur anyways. Just turn that crap off and set it to 1080p 60fps. You can do it, you are just being a jerk about it. Just like how you could put NPCs in 76. Stop lying to people and just listen to the customer. If you had done that you wouldn't have been bleeding money and needed to be bought out.

 

[Matt Dargis]

30 is absolutely fine considering the scope of this game. An option for people who like 60 with lower res should be an option though.

 

[darknight765]

30 is absolutely fine considering the scope of this game. An option for people who like 60 with lower res should be an option though.

That's what I'm saying. Let's be real about this. This game runs at 1440p 30 on the series S. That's a 4tflops GPU. Todd really sat there with a straight face and said they needed 30 for head room. You can bump that game down to 1440p or 1080p, make some tweaks and probably get it run at 60 in a short amount of time.

And Phil is in the arctle saying it was creative choice not a hardware problem. So I say again, why not give us choices?

 

[fjtorres5591]

If you don't believe Howard, how about Digital Foundry?

They have a video online explaining why Bethesda *chose* to lock at 30fps, why and where it can hit 60fps (empty rooms!) and that reducing resolution to 720p buys nothing.

Also, by implication, why Bethesda rpg (and rpg adjacent) games run on the proprietary Creation engine(s) ant not on, say, UNREAL.

It's clear and obvious in retrospect: Bethesda RPGS are loaded with discrete in-game onjects and it keeps track of every single one. *THAT* is why it is CPU bound.

(They've done this since MORROWIND, which is why you can clear out a dungeon and it stays cleared. A friend of mine joined the Morag Tong and proceded to murder every non-essential NPC on the island. It was a very quiet place afterwards. )

So Howard was right: the game could hit sixty fps...sometimes...where there is nothing serious happening...only to go down to 30 when things do start to happen. The choice to be conservative and lock to 30 is intended to maintain consistency across both sparse and complex areas.

Now, whether they live up to that consistency is TBD.
We'll know by october.
(But I'm not holding my breath. Somebody always finds a way to break their games.)

 

[darknight765]

If you don't believe Howard, how about Digital Foundry?

They have a video online explaining why Bethesda *chose* to lock at 30fps, why and where it can hit 60fps (empty rooms!) and that reducing resolution to 720p buys nothing.

Also, by implication, why Bethesda rpg (and rpg adjacent) games run on the proprietary Creation engine(s) ant not on, say, UNREAL.

It's clear and obvious in retrospect: Bethesda RPGS are loaded with discrete in-game onjects and it keeps track of every single one. *THAT* is why it is CPU bound.

(They've done this since MORROWIND, which is why you can clear out a dungeon and it stays cleared. A friend of mine joined the Morag Tong and proceded to murder every non-essential NPC on the island. It was a very quiet place afterwards. )

So Howard was right: the game could hit sixty fps...sometimes...where there is nothing serious happening...only to go down to 30 when things do start to happen. The choice to be conservative and lock to 30 is intended to maintain consistency across both sparse and complex areas.

Now, whether they live up to that consistency is TBD.
We'll know by october.
(But I'm not holding my breath. Somebody always finds a way to break their games.)

Who said anything about starfield running on Unreal? And I saw that video, right after they spent 5 mins talking about how the resolution doesn't change anything he literally does a pixel count and says the game is running at 1200p using temporal reconstruction to hit 4k. So say it with me, they lower the resolution to so they could get a better frame rate. Now as I said in my OG post there are other things they can do to improve the frame rate without messing with the creative vision of the game.

The game uses GI for lighting. You can turn down how many bounces it calculates per ray. Todd literally said they use the sun to do the lighting for every planet in a system. That's what's kill the CPU, not the objections in the game. Every game Bethesda has made over the last decade or so has had object perm in it. Morrowind which launch on the 360 had that feature, and skyrim as well. The cpu in those consoles might as well be controlling a toast they are so weak yet it still ran, you know why? It's SCALABLE. Frankly its laughable that so many people think this dudes hands where tied and there was no way he could get 60 without breaking the game.

I'm telling you , he could, he just doesn't want to. And the reason for that is Todd does not care about frame rate. Which is fine. If he wants to play the game at the highest resolution with the calculations as high as they will go, with 30 bounces per ray so the lightening look real, go for it. What I am saying is there should be an option for people like me who don't care about that and want to play at a frame rate that doesn't make them sick.

I have a fairly beef PC so I'm sure I can get it where I want it. But not everyone is as fortunate as me. Maybe that series X is all they can afford. Todd basically told people like that (which is a rather large group of people) to kick rocks. And instead of calling him out for it the media is largely covering for him. So I'll end this with a quote from Phil Spencer. "That was a creative decision, not an issue with the hardware." That the CEO of Xbox telling you it was possible but the devs didn't care.