Rohit Tiwari
Starfield is easily one of the most hyped games of this decade and is now available in early access for players with premium edition, captivating them so far with everything that it has to offer. AMD is the exclusive PC partner for Starfield and the game will definitely run very smoothly on its technology but it is not yet known if the game will have above-par performance on non-AMD GPUs.
While the company says that it does not restrict game developers from supporting other tech like Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS, it has partnered with Bethesda to prioritize AMD’s technology and player base. FSR 2 works on almost every GPU but it might not have results like DLSS or XeSS.
Starfield automatically enables a bit of upscaling on most GPUS and Settings but based on the game’s system requirements it seemed like non-AMD GPUs would just do fine but it doesn’t look like so anymore. The reason behind this could be a game update or Bethesda just didn’t put enough effort into tuning the game to run smoothly on other tech than AMD.
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PC System Requirements for Starfield
Minimum Requirements:
OS: Windows 10 version 21H1 (10.0.19043)
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700 or NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti
Memory: 16 GB RAM
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 125 GB available space
Recommended Requirements:
OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X or Intel i5-10600K
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
Memory: 16 GB RAM
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 125 GB available space
Although the minimum PC requirements for Starfield are not very demanding, the GPU choices are a bit backward as AMD RX 5700 runs more than 25–30% faster than Nvidia’s GTX 1070 Ti, and the players might need to get a more powerful Nvidia GPU. The recommended requirements are quite an upgrade from the minimum requirements to Nvidia’s RTX 2080 or AMD’s RX 6800 XT. These specifications suggest that a faster GPU card will be very helpful as RX 6800 XT outperforms RTX 2080 any day.
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Starfield Players With Non-AMD GPUs Are in for a Hard Time
As per the analysis, Nvidia’s GTX 1070 Ti GPU card mentioned in the minimum requirement fails to get a stable 30fps and sometimes even drops to 22fps. Although Nvidia’s recommended RTX 2080 card can easily run the game at 1080p or 1440p ultra, but only gets a steady 49 frames per second and is much slower than even AMD’s minimum requirement RX 5700. However, AMD’s recommended card RX 6800 XT is easily able to get 104 frames per second at 1080p medium settings.
This states that there are some issues with other non-AMD GPUs, or at least on Nvidia as normally, RTX 2080 beats the RX 5700 by somewhere around 30 percent. If players go below 1080p medium resolution, the GTX 1070 Ti can result in around 51 fps at 720p low, and the RX 5700 is already doing fine at 1080p medium but in that case, even RX 590 puts up around 44 fps at 720p. On 1080p and 1440p ultra presets, AMD RX 6800 XT puts up 60 fps but RX 5700 will not clear over 30 fps on 1080p and to perform better, either Bethesda or Nvidia has to do some optimizations. On 4k, even AMD’s RX 6800 XT will put up an average of 30 frames per second.
AMD’s GPUs are relatively doing better in running Starfield and using their power but Nvidia GPUs are either not working properly or the game is underutilizing them. This could be due to driver issues or something might be wrong with the game engine and if these issues are taken care of, it will increase their performance overall and even the minimum required Nvidia GPU will clock at least 30 fps.
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Starfield heavily favors AMD GPUs
Even though Starfield has decent graphics settings to adjust, there is no full-screen mode and players are stuck with windowed or borderless windowed. The game also does not have Anti-aliasing and though FSR2 provides that if it’s enabled, however, Starfield uses some kind of TAA even if FSR2 isn’t enabled and there’s no way to disable it in the game menu.
There are 4 graphic presets in the game but despite the number of settings tweaked, the performance does not improve much and there is only an improvement of around 35% with the recommended RX 6800. Overall, the game performance can be fine with the high-end hardware and even if AMD says that it does not prevent its partners from implementing technology like DLSS, it does have them prioritize AMD technologies and hardware and so is seen with Starfield which is promoted by AMD and the differences in performance between AMD and NVidia’s GPUs is certainly that nobody expected.
For Nvidia to perform better, it will have to further optimize its drivers to improve Starfield‘s performance. Game patches will also hopefully help Nvidia and Intel in the future but currently, AMD tops the GPU choice for Starfield. It is clear that Bethesda’s partnership with AMD has influenced this or they just did not try much to optimize the game on other GPUs. And if players are looking for new GPUs for Starfield, they need to go with AMD, and seeing how more than 80 percent of gamers use Nvidia’s, Bethesda has made a big mistake.
Also Read: Starfield Is Still In Early Access And Already Has More Than 100 Mods
Source: Tom’s Hardware
