Starfield Optimization Controversy

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Overview

Starfield Optimization Controversy, also known as Todd Howard "Upgrade Your PC," refers to the purported poor performance of the Bethesda RPG Starfield and how it runs on various PC builds. Following its release in early September 2023, numerous users online began reporting issues with the game's optimization (including stereotypical Bethesda bugs), prompting CEO Todd Howard to refute these claims, which subsequently resulted in the game and its perceived performance issues becoming hot topics of conversation and viral debate across social media.

Background

Shortly after the launch of Starfield on September 6th, 2023 (which faced a myriad of launch issues and bugs similar to other games),^[5] CEO Todd Howard was taking questions from Bloomberg Technology when the question was posed why he didn't optimize Starfield. After a pause, Howard stated that Starfield was optimized and that people simply needed to upgrade their PCs. A clip of this segment was uploaded to YouTube on September 7th, 2023, by YouTuber clanky4,^[1] garnering over 8,600 views in six days (shown below).

Online Reactions

Todd Howard's statement on September 6th, 2023, quickly sparked viral debates throughout the gaming scene online, with many defending him if they faced little bugs during their playthroughs and many others attacking him for either lying about optimizing the game or being out of touch with gamers (similar to the infamous Do You Guys Not Have Phones? moment).

For example, on September 9th, 2023, X user @OfficialPCMR^[2] uploaded a meme of a person with Todd Howard's face Photoshopped onto it with a monstrous PC next to them, captioning it as though Howard has no problem running Starfield so others should stop whining (shown below).

"Can't understand why people are whining. Starfield plays fine on my rig"

Later that day, Redditor u/nefsen402^[3] put together a write-up that a developer of the software that Starfield uses to render the game (Vulkan) posted that explained the various issues that can be found within the game, purportedly going against the narrative that it was optimized. Among the chief issues supposedly found were memory being incorrectly allocated, abuse of a rendering protocol that can lead to various errors and not properly batching several actions together instead of sending multiple actions at one time (shown below).

r/Starfield. Posted by u/LavaMeteor Freestar Collective 6 hours ago Major programming faults discovered in Starfield's code by VKD3D dev - performance issues are *not* the result of non-upgraded hardware Discussion I'm copying this text from a post by /u/nefsen402, so credit for this write-up goes to them. I haven't seen anything in this subreddit about these horrendous programming issues, and it really needs to be brought up. Vkd3d (the dx12->vulkan translation layer) developer has put up a change log for a new version that is about to be (released here) and also a pull request with more information about what he discovered about all the awful things that starfield is doing to GPU drivers (here). Basically: 1. Starfield allocates its memory incorrectly where it doesn't align to the CPU page size. If your GPU drivers are not robust against this, your game is going to crash at random times. 2. Starfield abuses a dx12 feature called ExecuteIndirect. One of the things that this wants is some hints from the game so that the graphics driver knows what to expect. Since Starfield sends in bogus hints, the graphics drivers get caught off gaurd trying to process the data and end up making bubbles in the command queue. These bubbles mean the GPU has to stop what it's doing, double check the assumptions it made about the indirect execute and start over again. 3. Starfield creates multiple `ExecuteIndirect` calls back to back instead of batching them meaning the problem above is compounded multiple times. What really grinds my gears is the fact that the open source community has figured out and came up with workarounds to try to make this game run better. These workarounds are available to view by the public eye but Bethesda will most likely not care about fixing their broken engine. Instead they double down and claim their game is "optimized" if your hardware is new enough. 961 Comments Award Share Save 403 people here

Modders

On September 8th, 2023, content creator and X user @MizoChris^[4] uploaded a video of his version of Starfield after he had downloaded a mod that enabled DLSS, a feature of Nvidia graphics cards that boosts the performance of the games but was not present at launch. The video, as well as independent testing by other content creators, led to the belief that the game was not properly optimized because modding DLSS into the game purportedly smooths things out and reduces crashes (shown below).

Curious how well optimized Starfield is on PC with DLSS Mod?#Starfield #bethesda #BethesdaGameStudios #nvidia #pcmr #pcgamer #pcgaming #xbox #ps5 pic.twitter.com/llyx2i63mV

— Chris Mizo 🇹🇼🇺🇲🇮🇹 (@MizoChris) September 8, 2023