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Analyzing Starfield’s Performance on Nvidia’s 4090 and AMD’s 7900 XTX
- fennecfoxy 3y agoI 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 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.
- Mistletoe 3y agoI 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.
- SaltyBackendGuy 3y agoIMO the quest lines and the powers are very Skyrim'y. Combat is undeniably Fallout without vats, which I think is a good thing.
- catchnear4321 3y agoso you thought it was more todd howard’s nostalgic sciencey game in space, less todd howard’s dark fantasy game in space?
- SigmundA 3y agoI have heard it described as Fallout without the depression. Definitely a more positive setting.
- Alupis 3y agoNow 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.
- SigmundA 3y agoWell here is a whole thread of people who feel similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16ap6ol/starfield_is_fallout_without_the_depression/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16ap6ol/starfiel...
- thdespou 3y agoPeople have problems...
- Mistletoe 3y agoI 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.
- yreg 3y agoI like that the "dungeons" are less dark/dreadful. They remind me of mass effect.
- blargey 3y agoFunny, 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- karim79 3y agoI 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.
- FPGAhacker 3y agoDude, choplifter! Haven't thought about that game for a long time.
- dclowd9901 3y agoWhy on god’s green earth does the game not have city maps? It’s like they never actually play tested in a city
- karim79 3y agoI 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.
- xyzzy123 3y agoI 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).
- karim79 3y agoThat 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.
- ternaus 3y ago> 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_cutting_out_and_game_freezing_normal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16bm1f7/audio_cu... GPU: GTX 2080 Ti CPU: threadripper 3950x RAM: 64Gb Game installed on SSD
- gigel82 3y agoFWIW, 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
- SigmundA 3y agoPlaying 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.
- disambiguation 3y agoRunning a 1080ti and no issues so far (nvme, 16gb ram, AMD 5600x)
- genewitch 3y agoif 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.
- nxobject 3y agoCan 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.
- MindSpunk 3y agoMost modern AAA engines do deferred lighting/shading in compute too
- brucethemoose2 3y agoBGS games are notorious for really weird bottlenecks, like Skyrim's much loathed CPU shadows.
- dragontamer 3y agoGood 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).
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThey 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.
- tstrimple 3y agoIt'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.
- prox 3y agoCase 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.
- Hamuko 3y agoNvidia 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.
- uejfiweun 3y agoI 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.
- SigmundA 3y agoElite 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.
- wlll 3y agoIt’s also absolutely amazing in VR. Totally changed the game for me, I find it unplayable without.
- LinuxBender 3y agoElite 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.
- Arrath 3y agoYup, I think this is the closest thing out there to what to OP is looking for. It is pretty open and empty, though.
- uejfiweun 3y ago
- whalesalad 3y agoI’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.
- nerdix 3y agoI 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.
- pohuing 3y agoIs it a stable experience? I've bought the 5700xt and the 6900xt and both cards were/still are unstable messes with countless ignored bugs.
- yesco 3y agoAre you sure your power supply was large enough? I had similar stability issues with the 6900xt until I upgraded my PSU.
- pohuing 3y agoYeah 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)
- nerdix 3y agoI 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.
- SigmundA 3y agoAMD 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.
- nerdix 3y agoSome 7900 XTX models can be found for as low as $950.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoWich 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/ https://steamdb.info/app/1716740/
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoIt 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.
- etempleton 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blargey 3y agoIt'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.
- airtonix 3y ago[dead]
- Ameo 3y agoI'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
- Neil44 3y agoThe 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.
- Remnant44 3y agoAgreed. I really appreciate their deep dives into uArch - their article on the Zen4's front and back end answered so many questions for me..
- Voultapher 3y agoFully 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.
- pjmlp 3y agoVery interesting and deep analysis of GPU utilization.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoStarfield 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.
- boo-ga-ga 3y agoBut 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?
- MikusR 3y agoI 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.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoOn 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.
- nickthegreek 3y agoCyberpunk 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.
- 3y ago
- novaRom 3y agoAMD 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.
- haunter 3y agoWhat does this have to do with the article?
- regularfry 3y agoIf 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.