Starfield Should Have a 60 FPS Performance Mode

Starfield should launch with a 60 FPS performance mode, and that should be standard across all current generation games.

[Jin_Sakai]

Yes it should. But we’ll continue blaming the CPU and and give Bethesda a fee pass.

[ZycoFox]

The Series X is running a 2 generations older CPU than on desktop, and it runs at 3.8GHz, on PC boost is well over 5GHz on newer chips so that with the IPC on top because it's a newer chip (stronger clock for clock) means the game will likely run noticeably better on Intel Alder Lake 12 Gen and newer CPUs, and of course newer AMD chips.

DF said: "With all of the CPU demands that this sort of a game entails then, dropping the resolution might not have much of an effect on the overall frame-rate. As a developer, you may as well crank up the visuals and embrace that 30fps output for an overall more consistent output..."

It's a demanding game on the CPU.

[just_looken]

the game they created is demanding yes but that is there fault

You have the capability of your hardware so create a product that will work with in it.

This is like a contractor trying to install a circle door in a square frame then blame the homeowner said homeowner is like i agree and just accepts that no door is better.

Also i am sorry but 12gen intel for real? you do realize pc hardware from am4 platform is way more popular than the am5/lga 1700 era.

What you said is that anyone with a pc with a cpu older than 2021 should not be able to play this game are you for real?

What is next a rtx 4090 13900k for 1080 medium settings and we all are like hey that is fine?

[ZycoFox]

@just_looken

Instead of making up something I never said, read what I said again. I said those CPUs would likely run the game noticeably better (than console) who said anything about not being able to play the game on lesser hardware?

Wish people would stop making up nonsense I never even said.

[Crows90]

So in other words.,.the series s is just as powerful as the series x?

Your words. Not mine.

[repsahj]

So now "In DF we trust"? Seriously, Xbox really need this game so why the heck they develop a game that only PC can handle higher framerate? I don't get it. >.<

[Rude-ro]

They always do sales pitches..
It is not resolution..
Shading, foliage distance, ray tracing, film grain etc etc is the cpu bottlenecks and all can be dialed back.

The game will be a slide show with screen tearing just like the rest of their games.

Cool they want to throw that much into the looks, but the culprits are what I stated above and probably global illumination.

[ZycoFox]

@Crows90

No.. The Series X has a more powerful GPU, the CPU is the bottleneck, if it's poor optimisation or just a demanding game, makes no difference, if it's hard on the CPU then that's what's going to cause dips in frame rate.

Pointless arguing this as most obviously don't get it.

[Chevalier]

Maybe stop trying to give Bethesda an excuse for their absolutely terrible design choice. At the end of the day it can be done, but, they chose to go another way that's the gist of it all.

[andy85]

And so is the PS5. How many games are
at 30? I'm running Ragnarok at 100 and Burning Shores at 80. Stop with these free passes. If you're telling me Starfield has more going on to put it at 30 (when each planet loads separately) and doesn't look as graphically intensive as BS, you're talking nonsense.

[VariantAEC]

You: "The Series X is running a 2 generations older CPU than on desktop, and it runs at 3.8GHz, on PC boost is well over 5GHz on newer chips so that with the IPC on top because it's a newer chip means the game will likely run noticeably better on Intel Alder Lake 12 Gen and newer CPUs, and of course newer AMD chips."

PS5: 'Basically everything including games like Horizon Forbidden West which has an insane number of highly detailed independent objects with loads of drawcalls... running at 60FPS'

XSX running Starfield: 'Too many sandwiches to render here... 30FPS.'

Xbox's Matt Booty: 'Devs need to plan better, it's not our fault XSS is trash that can't run modern games well... Look at Starfield we forced Bethesda to target 30FPS.'

[VariantAEC]

@rude-ro
"Shading, foliage distance, ray tracing, film grain etc etc is the cpu bottlenecks and all can be dialed back."

Shading is GPU related foliage alpha effectscare also GPU intensive not so much CPU intensive even though each foliage object COULD be a separate drawcall it will likely be instanced saving resources on the CPU side of things but the GPU still has to render all of it... so foliage is basically GPU intensive. The only thing CPU intensive about raytracing is setting up the bounding hierarchical volume which could be optimized by the GPU but does it even matter when we're talking about Starfield which does not look like it will have a lot in the way of RT? Filmgrain is not at all taxing (may graphically sophisticated PS3 games featured filmgrain effects like Killzone 2 and 3 and it is once again a GPU related process I thinking post-process compositing has zero to a very tiny impact on CPU compute.

The culprits will likely be bloated AI and really poor management of world systems that drive AI, the various collectibles, player activated triggers and much more all stuff you don't see directly. The GPU handles most of the stuff you see these days while the CPU sets up the world so the GPU can render it the CPU can be pretty weak in a graphically demanding game and still allow for 60FPS gameplay... see Ratchet & Clank or Jak and Daxter way back on the PS2 or even a game a I reference more and more as time keeps on ticking by Haven: Call of The King a 3rd party PS2 exclusive that basically did everything and still ran at 60FPS. Haven was the non-RPG Starfield space epic of its day 20 years ago... with the major difference being that Starfield is way less directed or linear and will likely sell significantly better.

How did Haven running on PS2 with all its stages built on spherical planets that you could travel to and from in realtime in one of only a few spaceships run at 60FPS on PS2 without any loadind screens but Starfield can't? Haven was still a much better looking game than PS2/Xbox GTA titles.

Optimization is the key and Xbox is telling devs to plan better for Series S (or skip Xbox Series entirely because releasing on S is a requirement for Xbox console releases for now), and while devs should optimize there's only so much that can be done. Clearly XSS' GPU is modern enough feature-set wise to handle anything the XSX can render including RT but because the CPU and GPU are weaker on XSS everything needs to be scaled back. The idea of releasing Xbox Series S was monumentally stupid one but MS made its bed and now PS is once again eating it's lunch. That said I see why MS is doing this... they don't have a choice. MS knows they made their bed a mess and are now trying to sleep in it, but it's difficult for them and with all the missteps they're forced to live by their marketing on this one.

Would XSS users forgive MS if they allowed XSX to get games that XSS users cannot play? Don't know.

[OptimusDK]

You should see the DF analyses and understand why this is not feasible. It would require the game to be you bound which it is not. Physics and simulation are the reason. Don’t be ignorant

[Pocahontas]

Don’t assume they couldn’t. Don’t be purposefully ignorant.

[Sonic1881]

Xbox fans says 30fps is OK now and they stand by that. I do find that comical though. As a PC gamer first, I can't go back to 30fps

[Jin_Sakai]

Starfield looks amazing don’t get me wrong but I think not offering a performance mode is a mistake.

[Sonic1881]

"Starfield looks amazing"

I've seen a lot of great looking games in my life and I wasn't blown away by Starfield graphics or gameplay. Starfield graphics is not even in my top 5 list for best looking game. I can name a lot of games that look better than Starfield but I don't wanna go there. Maybe because Bethesda is using an old game engine. It looks overrated but I hope I'm wrong about Starfield and not having a performance mode is ridiculous at least for the Xbox series X version

[Jin_Sakai]

“Maybe because Bethesda is using an old game engine.“

I think the visuals look nice. Todd said id Software helped them with the graphics and updating the Creation Engine for Starfield.

[VariantAEC]

I can't understand skipping a game over 30FPS. I prefer playing with better visuals and if the option exists to play at 30 with noticeably better visuals and resolution I will choose that over 60FPS because my eyes work. Resolution isn't as important to me personally... but playing HFW on PS5 at 60FPS reduces effect quality so much I swapped to 30FPS mode. It 60FPS was too much of a sacrifice to me and I'm playing the game on a 1080p display. If there was no distinct visual differences I would probably play at 60FPS but even R&C:RA's PerfRT mode looks noticeably worse than the quality mode. The 40Hz option is really nice because you can play with the same visual fidelity as the 30FPS quality mode at a higher framerate. More games need that option... that said I currently can't make use of that mode because my display doesn't support 120Hz so I play R&C:RA at 30FPS. I will sometimes swap to 60FPS in all these games to see if there are tangible differences in input response, but there usually isn't.

Forza Horizon 5 on PC makes things complicated for me because the game looks only ok at max settings (the bar for me is Driveclub and FH5 is well beneath it even maxed out with RT controversial I know, but I think Driveclub looks better than GT7 too) and unfortunately unlike most PS games on console FH5 actually f•••• up physics at 30FPS (in discreet ways) so it can make significant differences to how well you and the AI drive even if actually controlling the game feels unchanged. Even there I often choose to run at 30FPS in 1080p instead of targeting 60FPS, but knowing FH5's physics are just a little messed up at 30FPS keeps me from even playing it as often as I used to.

MS just can't win... and I actually like Forza Horizon picked up 3-5 fon PC, I think highly of Playground Games because of their Horizon series, but it's actually disgusting that I need a better PC to play FH5 properly due to its wonky physics engine being unable to work at lower framerates (even when the CPU isn't being hammered). FH4 works fine at 60FPS maxed out at 1440p (with 8x MSAA), but it has some gross visual issues with respect to drawing ground textures with massive square pixels on PC pretty regularly (which I never heard anyone talk about).

Anyway, most of the time playing at 30FPS isn't the problem performance focused gamers believe it is. Especially when it comes to competitive gaming online where it wasn't untill fairly recently that certain games net code even uploaded data from client devices as frequently as the game updates the display.

It's ignorance that fuels gamers belief that all or even most competitive online gaming requires 60FPS or that 30FPS incurs significant penalties in any game.

I'm of two minds on this. I personally don't think Starfield running at 30FPS is a problem. But I also think Starfield should look way better than it does if it's going to be locked at 30FPS.
Even Xbox fans are saying this is Bethesda's first genuinely good looking game from the visuals perspective so given how talented MS thinks it's software developers are and Bethesda's own drive to push visuals... why not push even better visuals and make 30FPS appear to be worthwhile on XSX?

[Pocahontas]

Bethesda are terrible at polish. They let out they had an extra 2 years of dev time. With compression and compression like techniques they should have had a performance mode or at least an uncapped mode.

[Good-Smurf]

Their game engine are just crap and has been for long time.
The only Bethesda developed games I played were Fallout 3/New Vegas and they're still have odd frame drops for no reason just by simply running around the map even on modern hardware.
For games over 12 years old I expect it to run constantly over 100 fps or locked 60 fps but nope at times it simply couldn't hold 60 fps and can dropped below 30 on a 12 gen i9 CPU.
Expect some miracle that Starfield will running well and optimized on PC let alone consoles, if you need high end rig just to play at high frame rates then you done messed up your game.
IDGAF if the game turned out great but it runs like crap expect many reviews to just glossed over the obvious issue as usual.

[Lightning77]

If SF 60fps isn't stable on PC. Then the console versions were right.

[Crows90]

Right...nothing to do with poor optimization akin to most Bethesda games.

[--Onilink--]

I cant really say previous Bethesda games were poorly optimized in terms of performance.

They were horribly buggy, no doubt about it. But they have never been particularly terrible in terms of performance given that they were never particularly advanced graphically.

The issues that started to crop up, were usually once you had the game track way too many objects when you got further into the game

[ZycoFox]

If a game is demanding on the CPU it makes no difference if the CPU is the bottleneck anyway, in turn causing frame rate dips, most here obviously do not understand this simple point. This is why both Series X and Series S are 30fps locked.

You twisted my previous comment to say that I was saying Series S is as powerful as the X.. Yeah nice try. Maybe don't argue over things you don't understand.

[Pocahontas]

@—Onilink— this is BS the game ran like shit on PS3 and xbox360. They got down to single digit frames. They teared like no other and crashes like no other. People give Bethesda grade A dev marks because the love their games. It’s just not true though. One of the most overrated developers in the industry.

[Crows90]

@Number
Didnt twist anything. If resolution doesnt make a difference then there is little differenct between the series s and x in this game. That means, assuming we take your word for it and a lot of xbox fans here, there is little power difference between series x and s.

Otherwise, either the series s will struggle significantly to keep that 30fps or the x can actually do higher but the game was poorly optimized. The other scenario is the dumb down a lot of settings for the series s so that its inferior gpu AND cpu can actually handle the game...but this would fly in the face that lowering settings wouldnt do anything.

Its called common sense but maybe next time dont argue about what you dont understand.
Also uncle phil said its a creative choice...take it up with him.

[anast]

Of course it should. They should have had this in mind from the beginning, but they got to cut those corners and give everyone the cheapest product possible.

[JackBNimble]

Right, in a huge open world game running in high fidelity/ 4k ?
You think these $500 consoles are magic or something?

I'm betting most pc gamers are going to have to turn down their settings just to run at 60fps.

[wesnytsfs]

I sure hope your wrong. I have yet to see game that made me turn down settings on PC. I do however keep the vid card updated to the newest 90 series from nvidia.

[anast]

"You think these $500 consoles are magic or something?"

This is entirely on the processionals making the game. This is what they get paid for.

[Cockney]

scalability? They can get it to 60 no problems on X, its just the S, how far down can you go until it looks a blurry mess? 1st party parity, if its not on the S its not on the X

[VariantAEC]

Horizon Forbidden West runs at 60FPS and looks far better than Starfield even if it's not rendering at 4K.

No one is saying Starfield needs to be 4K AND 60FPS, everyone is confused how PS5 is running games at 60FPS while the supposedly more powerful Xboz Series X console is stuck at 30FPS in games that look significantly uglier though.

[RavenWolfx]

Perhaps Bethesda is just waiting for some modder to fix their shit and they will release that as a patch.

[jjb1981]

It'll be the Legendary Edition.

[Sonic1881]

Lol

[Whitey2k]

Thou apu has some benefits but will and always be slower then the desktop counterpart

[Npugz7]

Ya there’s no excuse! Let us choose fidelity or framrate!

[Magog]

Everyone is quoting DF like they actually analyzed the game. They just speculated.

"With all of the CPU demands that this sort of a game entails then, dropping the resolution MIGHT not have much of an effect on the overall frame-rate."

That's based on nothing but looking at a trailer. It's just making an excuse for a much hyped game to miss a basic performance target. If they actually had access to CPU utilization rates and could prove what they were saying it might have weight but a guess isn't evidence of anything.

[--Onilink--]

They didnt just speculate, they elaborated with real world examples.
Its not like they said it cant done, they explained fhat if the game is CPU bound, a performance mode is not really about dropping resolution, that hardly makes a difference, which is why they mentioned Star Citizen doing 60fps and 90+ GPU utilization in exploration parts but doing 20+ fps in cities and barely doing 30% GPU utilization there.

If you want another example, just look at Plague Tale, the performance mode took some time because it wasn’t about dropping resolution, they had to reduce several aspects, drop the number of rats and actually keep them at 30fps while everything else is 60.

I honestly do expect them to release a performance mode eventually, but I also can see that given their type of game, its something that is going to take some time and consideration into which systems they need to scale down and they simply choose not to compromise on any of them for launch and stick to 30.

The “evidence” is that all their previous games have had this same kind of systems, at a lower scale even, and we already know those are CPU heavy.

Could they have a made a 60fps mode for launch? Sure, it would have probably meant a couple months of delay and they must have decided it was not worthy to delay yet again just for that

[Magog]

Yeah IF. There is no actual way for them to know if that's the case. A few sandwiches laying around isn't going to bring a modern CPU to it's knees. If morrowind could do it on the Xbox then it's not as taxing as they are pretending it is.

[--Onilink--]

Magog, you have to be really dense to take the sandwiches literally… kudos for that I guess.

We already know from previous games that they track all the objects you pick up everywhere. We also know that the longer you play, the more taxing this becomes, which is why yes, on Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 the performance would get worse the more things you hoarded and the more you played, regardless of the platform.

The sandwiches show they are still doing that, now its just on an even bigger scale.

And again, its not just the item tracking, its that plus all other CPU related systems, AI routines, crowd density in cities, tracking systems for what you are doing on remote outposts, etc.

No one is doubting that a 60fps mode can be done, even they mention that the game has no problem hitting 60, just not everywhere.
And if and when they release a performance mode, it will likely cut back on some of those systems. They probably just decided it wasn’t worth the likely delay it would have meant to do it.

Or they simply don't want to scale back those systems and it will stay at 30, it’s ultimately their choice for how the envisioned the game to be.

You should probably get ready to see more 30fps games from many developers too, its going to get more common as the generation progresses, where developers simply choose to pack as much as they can and do 30 fps, you can already tell in many games that the cutbacks for the performance modes, even when they are just graphical changes, can be quite significant and make the game look decidedly worse

[Exvalos]

We warned you the Series S was going to hold back Xbox, none of you wanted to listen, you reap what you sow

[--Onilink--]

The minimum recommended specs on PC are even lower than what Series S can do… so does that mean PC is holding back the Series S?

Also, there are plenty of examples for a game having a performance mode on Series X and not S, so what exactly does the Series S have to do with the topic?

[Cockney]

1st party parity is a thing, we've seen it with halo, any mode needs to be on the S as well as the X, if the series S can't do split screen 2 player coop then the X doesn't either, same as starfield, a 60 fps option is a reasonable request from gamers and for that to happen on the X it may have to be 60/1080-1440 and thats ok I guess but now we have the S, 60/540-640, still happy? Thats a blurry mess even on a 1080p TV not to mention thats early ps3/360 numbers. I think this will be a thorn in xbox side for the rest of this generation

[--Onilink--]

@Cockney

Again… there are games out there where a performance mode was added only to the Series X. And just as it has been explained elsewhere, if the game is CPU bound (as its likely the case here), a performance mode isnt just abut dropping the resolution, that will hardly make an impact

[Cockney]

1@onilink again 1st part parity is a promise from xbox to its consumers, not 2nd or third party but 1st party, is there a 1st party game that has a mode on the x that isn't on the s?

[--Onilink--]

@cockney

Yes, as a matter of fact there are 1st party games that dont have the same modes across both consoles.

A couple that quickly come to mind that dont have a 120hz mode on S but do on X are Deathloop, Sea of Thieves and I believe there were a few other Bethesda/Zenimax games like that too.

The whole parity thing has always been about gameplay modes, not about performance modes.

[Exvalos]

...

[Destiny1080]

phil doesn't want to turn playing video games into some sort of math's exercise so a 60fps / 240p option is never going to happen

[JEECE]

I mean, I really think we need to stop thinking of 60 fps as "performance mode" and start looking at it as the baseline. The problem is that, even now, devs build their games with the standard being "what can we do on console while targeting 30 fps at a high resolution and visual fidelity?" So the 60 fps "performance mode" consists of the game when they've cranked the resolution down and turned off a ton of visual effects. When games are made that way, we're always going to get situations like this where a dev says "well, even turning resolution down and limiting effects, we can't get to 60 fps due to CPU limitations, etc, so we just won't have it."

As long as devs build with 30 fps as the baseline, we're always going to have games like Starfield where they can't achieve a 60 fps performance mode. There's going to be a lot more of this; look at how other devs are either being silent right or coming out in support of the Starfield devs, and how all the major games media (expect a few outliers) have completely adopted the party line on 30 fps. They all know more is coming.

[RavageX]

How about we focus on wanting the game to be good? You know that is kinda important too.

[Magog]

How good can a shooter be at 30fps? Not very.

[VariantAEC]

Killzone was pretty good. There are three 30FPS Killzone FPS games including the PS Vita game Killzone: Mercenary all played just fine. Before Killzone there was Halo on Xbox which was also 30FPS and before that Golden Eye 007 for N64 which ran at framerates from around 6-13FPS. Sure there were 60FPS FPSes (and other 3D games) on N64 and PS1 but those were more rare.

60FPS is not necessary to enjoy a game if the game is still responsive at 0.2 FPS (a frame every 5 seconds) it might still be good, even though I cannot imagine any game that would play well at 0.2 FPS... well maybe there are text based adventures, spot-the-difference and Myst-like games (since there's really not much going on in those types of games).

Personally 20FPS is the lowest I will go and most modern game engines don't play well at 20.

[akurtz]

I’m sure the game will be awesome, but we spend hundred of dollars on new consoles and hundreds more on uhd gaming tvs with modern tech to enjoy the best possible performance and the devs are cutting us short

[Christopher]

By this logic, why even aim for 30fps?

[anast]

It won't be. They said that you can join every faction in the game at the same time. This means your choices won't matter. It will be Skyrim in space just waiting for the modders to make it a solid experience.

[wiz7191]

So developers should forget about pushing graphics further and really push these machines , instead should be focusing on 60FPS ??

[anast]

It's called performance and quality mode.

[wiz7191]

Did you even watch the digital foundry deep dive ?? I’m guessing you didn’t

[anast]

It's still called performance mode.

[Phoenix76]

If the game is going to be running at 30/1440 on series s and 30/4k on series x, then why is it not possible to run it at 60/1440 or even 60/1080 on the series x?

[akurtz]

Cuz Bethesda

[Christopher]

They've decided to have it better looking at 30fps rather than build both a graphical quality mode and a performance mode. And, I'm going to assume a lot of this decision is because of how much work they're already doing to optimize Series S.

I'm hoping that they will have a post-release plan to work on a performance mode for Series X.

[Knushwood Butt]

It's a creative decision.

Phil says so.

[wiz7191]

@Knushwood it’s a creative decision , the people who are making the game said so ..

[Cockney]

I think you're asking the wrong question, you can't just make the series s disappear its a parity thing, if starfield can get to 60/1080 on X the series S will be 60/640, is being a blurry mess going to be ok? , now we start to see the gaping hole in the xbox strategy this gen

[Firebird360]

Its the reason I just ditched my xsx. The last reason I held out hope was that starfield would be a must buy. And while it is, I also refuse to buy anything under 60fps anymore. 60fps should be the minimum standard. Its 2023. We shouldn't be giving passes on going backwards in performance.
People defending a company putting out a game that goes backwards in performance is mind boggling.

[rakentaja]

I have no doubt that they deliberately don't support 60fps on consoles because Game Pass is much cheaper on Xbox than on PC and most people just download it at no extra cost. So they force you to play it on PC. Game Pass isn't that popular there, and you'd probably buy the game on Steam. Bedhesta's 30fps is definitely not stable, so in a fast-paced "fps" game, the experience will be terrible. I will definitely be upgrading my PC's GPU, even though my Xbox Game Pass still lasts over 2 years. No 30fps for me, after the headache I got after playing Redfall for two hours. Starfield is a once in a generation game and they're not giving it away with a pack of cigarettes because that's how cheap GP is on Xbox. Hundreds of developers have been working on this game for 8 years and they want every penny for it. They have found a way past cheap GP on consoles. Keep it at 30fps and let them suffer or most likely you'll play it on PC at full price. Game Pass is still to blame, but this time for a different reason.

[Soulsborne]

Should it not?

[jznrpg]

Running at 1296p and up to 30 fps from Digital Foundry who are always quick to make excuses for Starfield and MS.

Why even buy a Series X the supposed most powerful console in the universe and it can’t hit 60fps in any resolution and the 30fps they are delivering is currently at 1296p which is even worse.

It seems like they are pushing people to PC. Maybe that is purposely or it isn’t but either way it’s bad for Xbox console gamers.

To me it shows MS doesn’t care about the console space and all of their moves are headed farther away from console and towards stream anywhere or a PC sub.

[Bathyj]

They don't want to make consoles anymore.

Hardware makes little to no money and consoles are just a space where they will always be last

Gamepass is their only future now and MS has made it quite clear they'd prefer you bought it on PC, phones or TVs so they don't need to put that effort of R&D and manufacturing. MS are all about maximum return in minimum effort. .

[Bathyj]

If it's 30 it's 30.
Just make sure it's actually 30.

Any please don't brag anymore about having the most powerful console when you also have the weakest.

[Rimeskeem]

I can't remember the last time I played a first-person game at 30FPS. If my 3080 can't run the game at 60fps then Bethesda is a shitty developer.

[Beef5upreme83]

it does. it's called a pc

[Cueil]

The amount of ignorance in here is amazing. If people who know what they are talking about tell you the issue is CPU then it's probably CPU

[DarXyde]

I think we've established this with several topics at this point. I don't see what this contributes to the discourse.

Every game should feature options at this point. If played as a third-person title....eh, I guess it's not a big deal. But first person, yeah, I'm surprised it doesn't have it.

Will people hate the game solely on the basis that it runs at 30fps? Nah. Bethesda games have historically never been and I think it achieves a level of technical prowess that it's going to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience for Bethesda fans regardless.

I still think all games should have the option and it did have quite the substantial delay. But I don't think it's going to lose any support or accolades because of it. As long as it's stable, I think people are willing to overlook it. I suppose my question is whether or not they could have locked a performance mode at 40-45fps with VRR. And given the scale of the game, I don't get why they didn't opt for some cloud computing. A game like this, I think people would be totally understanding of an online requirement.

[shadowT]

Starfield has a 60 FPS Performance Mode: PC