The Starfield discussion thread.

[Grimlakin]

Every big game has had some pretty compelling patches to wait for. So we will see. I know I'll end up picking this one up though.

 

[LazyGamer]

If you know, you know:

 

[Grimlakin]

I did get this one with my 7900xtx purchase and am over 48 hours into the game. Man the side missions were FUN FUN. Looking forward to playing more.

Though the Main Quest line doesn't take things into account like.... they talk about what the rangers are... but if you do what I did you ARE a ranger... random guards see that I'm Vanguard, Ranger, and even UC SEC ops or whatever it's called. But the characters you get paired up with don't have the dialog to recognize it. After playing BG3... I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of depth there for the voiced lines.

 

[LazyGamer]

After playing BG3... I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of depth there for the voiced lines.

I feel like I should have kept notes on all the goofiness I'd run across. Plenty of annoyances, UI quirks, and just stuff that isn't obvious (like having to find coast biomes to fully scan all the fauna on a planet, who knew?).

And yeah, BG3 is on another level in that regard... mostly. I will say that once Starfield released on Game Pass, I haven't gone back to BG3. I will, eventually.

Only real regret so far is not having gotten the game on Steam - apparently most mods are completely unavailable, or are generally unstable with the Xbox Game Pass distribution. I've only gotten the DLSS mods to work briefly for example, and the stuff that's designed to make inventory management easier so far has only managed to corrupt the names of some inventory items.

 

[DrezKill]

Only real regret so far is not having gotten the game on Steam - apparently most mods are completely unavailable, or are generally unstable with the Xbox Game Pass distribution. I've only gotten the DLSS mods to work briefly for example, and the stuff that's designed to make inventory management easier so far has only managed to corrupt the names of some inventory items.

Oh shiiiiat, didn't know that. Not the first time UWP/Microsoft Store/Xbox Store/Windows Store/Game Pass/whatever programs have had compatibility issues, whether with mods or other programs or features like VSYNC or what-have-you.

 

[Grimlakin]

I was worried my video card was going to come with the Microsoft store version. Glad it was the steam revision.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Only real regret so far is not having gotten the game on Steam - apparently most mods are completely unavailable, or are generally unstable with the Xbox Game Pass distribution. I've only gotten the DLSS mods to work briefly for example, and the stuff that's designed to make inventory management easier so far has only managed to corrupt the names of some inventory items.

I didn't realize how expansive that issue was. In the beginning, when I was researching HDR, FOV, UW support, DLSS, etc., I remember seeing some posts about that but figured folks would've figured out a way around it quickly. That was all during its first couple of weeks of release. I am going to get back to this game but I've decided I'll wait until they provide real support for NVIDIA cards. I expect that'll be around the holidays or the new year.

 

[Zarathustra]

I didn't realize how expansive that issue was. In the beginning, when I was researching HDR, FOV, UW support, DLSS, etc., I remember seeing some posts about that but figured folks would've figured out a way around it quickly. That was all during its first couple of weeks of release. I am going to get back to this game but I've decided I'll wait until they provide real support for NVIDIA cards. I expect that'll be around the holidays or the new year.

I run the game with the DLSS mod just because, but if I am going to be honest, I don't think I can tell the difference between it and FSR, at least not in this title.

I think people make too big of a deal out of it.

 

[LazyGamer]

I run the game with the DLSS mod just because, but if I am going to be honest, I don't think I can tell the difference between it and FSR, at least not in this title.

Well, DLSS should be faster on Nvidia GPUs (or look better at the same speed), but I agree that the FSR implementation in Starfield is head and shoulders above say what went into Jedi Survivor.

And given the archaic Bethesda tech Starfield runs on, I don't think I'd be able to differentiate between game engine artifacts and upscaling artifacts (again, unlike Jedi Survivor).

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I run the game with the DLSS mod just because, but if I am going to be honest, I don't think I can tell the difference between it and FSR, at least not in this title.

I'd have to go back and look but I tried a couple of different ones and one was basically useless while another absolutely gained frames while leaving the game looking good but it did take a little bit of work to set up. The drawback is that pretty much anytime a game update comes out it can overwrite the files so you have to go back and re-do it all. It just gets to be too much work after a while with everything else I've got going on.

 

[Zarathustra]

So Starfield hammers the drive pretty bad, and this occasionally leads to stuttering.

I just so happened to have a 960GB Optane 905p drive kicking around. I bought it a while back when Intel announced they were getting rid of Optane, and they started dropping in price. I was going to use it for a project in my server, but that project never happened.

The drives have pretty poor sequential speeds by modern standards, but they still have absolutely MONSTROUS low queue depth 4K Random read speeds.

Allow me to illustrate:

Intel Optane 905p 960GB (4x Gen3) (possibly sabotaged by being my boot drive during test, and Win11 seemingly always hammering the boot drive)


Lets compare this to the other more common drives in my machine right now:


Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (4x Gen4)




Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (4x Gen4)




Samsung 970 Evo 1TB (4x Gen3)


So, as you can see, despite being the slowest sequential drive here, compared to the 990 Pro, it is over 4x faster at low queue depth 4k random reads.

It has always been my theory, that for typical client workloads, this is the performance measure that really matters, and that has certainly been the case for me in Starfield.

I installed the drive today, imaged over my boot drive to it, and moved my Starfield install to it, and did some testing.

Now this is all subjective testing, as I don't even know what objective measure I could use, but the game feels WAY smoother in busy cities, with none of the normal stutter I was getting even on the 990 Pro.

Not sure the pricetag is worth it just to play Starfield more smoothly, but it is certainly interesting.

As for other aspects of the drive, I have noted the following:
- OS and program launches do feel a little snappier, but once the system has been up for a while, everything is cached in RAM anyway I guess.
- Traditional full boots (not fastboot / hibernate) are MUCH faster on the Optane than on my 990 Pro
- Fastboot hibernate boots feel about the same.
- Windows update installs go by in a fraction of the time that they take on my 990 Pro, which doesn't make any sense looking at the write speeds, so I can't explain it, but they do.
- Closing a VM and dumping the RAM to disk (suspend to disk) takes a couple of seconds longer than it does with the 990 Pro. As does resuming that VM from disk again.

Wendell at Level1techs did a video on this a few months ago. The performance difference can be quite astonishing:

In my subjective testing, running around New Atlantis is WAY smoother on my Optane 905p than on my Samsung 990 Pro.

Worth noting is that the AIC / PCIe versions of the Optane 905p are CRAZY expensive for some reason. We are talking thousands of dollars. But the U.2 versions, which are essentially the same thing in a different form factor are running for about $300 in new sealed boxes. They come with an m.2 adapter for those who need it.

I used a Startech u.2 adapter card, essentially turning mine into a PCIe version

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

All I can say is wow!

 

[Zarathustra]

All I can say is wow!

It's a crying shame that Intel could never figure out how to make money on Optane and eventually shut it down. Optane was the true holy grail SSD technology. Amazing write endurance, crazy low I/O latency, killer performance, the complete package. These were truly the most amazing drives ever. The 905p was the last consumer version, and thus it is stuck at disappointing sequential performance by modern standards.

They made a Gen4 version for the datacenter, the Optane DC P5800x. It gets similar peak sequential numbers as a Samsung 990 Pro, and dominates 4k random reads even more so than the 905p. I would absolutely LOVE to have one, but they are unfortunately WAY out of reach from a pricing perspective.



By the time they come down to mere mortal pricing, I expect they too will be like the 905p. Awesome products, but with tradeoffs due to their age.

But if you have a storage performance fetish, and deep pockets, there is absolutely nothing better you can get right now than an Optane p5800x.

Here is the 800GB version (stolen from Servethehome's review)



The 1.6TB version is reportedly even faster, but I couldn't find RND4k data for it.

There is an "if I won the lottery I wouldn't tell anyone but there would be signs" meme in here. First purchase would probably be a 1.6TB Optane DC P5800x.

 

[Grimlakin]

Put a pair of those in raid 0 in your new threadripper 64 core system that can **** near hit 5ghz all core... pushing your closed loop 4090 and you'll be buttery smooth until the NEXT game comes out.

I will say for the system in my sig running at 1440p the game at max settings runs great. I haven't seen any hitching or problems like described. Maybe I would at 4k?

 

[Zarathustra]

Put a pair of those in raid 0 in your new threadripper 64 core system that can **** near hit 5ghz all core... pushing your closed loop 4090 and you'll be buttery smooth until the NEXT game comes out.

I thought of doing that, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way.

If you use them in RAID0 your sequential performance goes up, but at the same time you absolutely kill 4k random performance.

Essentially they will look a lot like a ~980 Pro.

...and a 980 Pro would be a hell of a lot cheaper.

It might be because Motherboard/Software RAID just can't keep up with the performance. Not sure. But in the testing I have seen, it just ruins everything that is special about these drives, which is the insane low queue depth 4k random reads.

 

[Zarathustra]

I will say for the system in my sig running at 1440p the game at max settings runs great. I haven't seen any hitching or problems like described. Maybe I would at 4k?

Odd. Different people may not be as sensitive to it I guess>

When I play the game it absolutely HAMMERS the drive. Constantly reading, even when just standing still doing nothing. Throughout most of the game this is fine, but in particularly intense scenes with many enemies, or in some busy urban areas with m any NPC's (New Atlantis, Akila City, Neon) these disk reads result in brief stutter for me.

its barely perceptible for me when running off of the Optane.

 

[Grimlakin]

Odd. Different people may not be as sensitive to it I guess>

When I play the game it absolutely HAMMERS the drive. Constantly reading, even when just standing still doing nothing. Throughout most of the game this is fine, but in particularly intense scenes with many enemies, or in some busy urban areas with m any NPC's (New Atlantis, Akila City, Neon) these disk reads result in brief stutter for me.

its barely perceptible for me when running off of the Optane.

That really is odd. I'm normally very sensitive to that stuff as well. Heck even when (SPOILER) the monsters attack the space port I didn't have a single stutter.

And my 980 pro is running like a champ and yes the game is NOT kind... maybe my CPU is preventing the stutter because my GPU is always waiting? Just a guess.

 

[Zarathustra]

And my 980 pro is running like a champ and yes the game is NOT kind... maybe my CPU is preventing the stutter because my GPU is always waiting? Just a guess.

Could be. I have no idea.

I have heard others talk about stutter issues in this game due to intense drive activity as well.

There was even a video about it by some youtuber.... Lets see if I can find it.

There is is! (I'm re-watching it now, as I am trying to remember what it was they said)

Maybe it's a combination effect of CPU and Drive of some sort?

By 3960x is pretty beefy, but it is Zen2, which is pretty dated at this point. So maybe it is users of systems with older CPU's that are experiencing this?

 

[Zarathustra]

And my 980 pro is running like a champ and yes the game is NOT kind... maybe my CPU is preventing the stutter because my GPU is always waiting? Just a guess.

Could be. I have no idea.

I have heard others talk about stutter issues in this game due to intense drive activity as well.

There was even a video about it by some youtuber.... Lets see if I can find it.

There is is! (I'm re-watching it now, as I am trying to remember what it was they said)

Maybe it's a combination effect of CPU and Drive of some sort?

By 3960x is pretty beefy, but it is Zen2, which is pretty dated at this point. So maybe it is users of systems with older CPU's that are experiencing this?

The you-tuber says this:



which could definitely explain why the Optane drive helps. it doesn't explain why you aren't having this issue though.

I thought everyone was.

 

[Grimlakin]

It's odd imtry to reflect on it and it's just not there. I've had stutters in other games though. I only have the drive and video card using my direct.owth I/o to the cpu socket and I have all the performance stuff turned on.. oh and I have the drive reliability mode thing turned on in magician as well. Will be glad to compare settings.