Don't know if you'll see this, but this kind of series to test the minimum and recommended specs for popular releases is something I'd love to see more

I'm so glad Phil unlocked telekinesis powers to now be on camera and continue filming.

The best thing Bethesda has given us recently is Todd being Todd in an interview telling that those claiming problems with the game need to upgrade their rigs because Starfield is so next gen. This man, after the Fallout 76 fiasco is still at it, no lessons learned, no humilty acquired, just a big hairy ballsack he sits on. It's so beautiful, never change Todd.

Thank you for making this video, this needs to be stated more often even as a series! These developers have been dropping the ball on PC ports consistently, they literally don't care anymore. People just want to spend time enjoying their purchase not trying to figure out what's wrong with their hardware or game, and their "support" tries to tell you it's your fault. No, more videos need to be made like this to break this illusion so companies can't use this excuse anymore.

Todd literally said “for everyone having performance issues, maybe it’s time to upgrade your hardware” 🤣🤣

Todd: this game is optimized. Jay:No this game is poorly optimized

One of the main thesis of software development is that one should NOT brute force through bad code. It would be great to remember that in reviews also.

id love to see more "minimum/recommended" spec builds for big upcoming titles!

This needs to be an occasional series. I like it

It actually took TWO GENERATIONS of GPUs to get the original Crysis under control.

Great video! I do agree with several others that a Min VS Rec series would be very cool for these AAA games.

kinda unrelated comment, something I really like about your channel is that your sponsors are always stuff we´re actually interesed in. I just recently build my pc but that Montech case looks very cool, I can see myself buying it

Todd: it's time to upgrade your pc Me at top spec: to what?

Crysis was technically amazing and demanding because of its tech. Starfield is just horribly optimized. I nearly _doubled_ my framerate with the DLSS mod.

Thanks for helping me flip the coin. Definitely going to wait for a sale and implemented improvements before I give Starfield a go.

Phil's laugh at 5:41 is hilarious hahaha

It's a good thing, that Todd Howard stated they optimised the game properly and you just need to upgrade your PC if you run into poor performance O.o

It's not. Crisis pushed hardware to the limits but the visual presentation was justified. This looks like a 2018 game with constant loadings screens and some textures out of 2010.

Excellent video - congratulations. Sometimes hype is overshadowing what you are actually getting. Well most times not sometimes

I found an okay running setting for my old I7-4790k with 16GB Ram and an GTX1070. I am getting between 30-40 fps and it runs good enough for me on 1080p. At least it doesn't lag too much and does not stutter and it is looking fairly crisp. (You really have to set rendering up to 75-80% otherwise everything is just a blurry mess.)

Crysis looked insane at the time though. It pushed graphics to a whole new level . Starfield is just pushing its ancient engine.

i wouldn't called SF the new Crysis cause that games was astounding and a real groundbreaking visual experience in those years, Starfield today looks.. good.. pretty... most of the time... and that's all, but i see what Jayz means

The difference is that Crisis looked cutting edge for its time while Starfield looks worse than some games released 5 years ago

So glad I found this. Thought I was going crazy with my settings. I am running an AMD 5600x with a RX 6600 with 48gb of RAM ( Thought I bought an extra 16gb but was 32gb but that is besides the point) on a 55" TV. Currently don't have a monitor or place to play with monitor. But I am getting 60ish fps if I am lucky but mostly sitting between 52-57 fps. Playable but wasn't expecting fps like this.

It would be very interesting to see a pair of video, with over testing the minimum specs with AMD cpu & gpu vs Intel & nvidia, and the second testing the recommended settings the same way

Crysis levels of performance with CoD levels of graphics.

Looking at the CPU benchmarks on various sites, it's obvious that there are a few issues. Things that could possibly help performance: keep E Cores enabled, disable HT/SMT, and run with the fastest memory you can afford (1:1 IF ratio on AMD). Also, it seems to run better in Windows 11.

It does look like FSR2 is not doing anything for frame rates. I ran using it at 4k ultra and returned an average of just over 60fps in general, but down to 49/50 in built up areas and 45 when in conversation with NPCs. Taking FSR2 off resulted in identical frame rates, but to my mind a slightly less sharp picture. My GPU utilisation on an Nvidia 4080 was at 99% though so not sure why Jays were so much lower with AMD hardware. I am running an i7 13700KF with 32Gb of DDR5 RAM at 5600Mhz. I also tried the DLSS 3 mod and while it looks better I did not get frame rates for it and it was unstable so I deleted it. Seems Bethesda have some patching to do and I really hope they will support DLSS via a patch.

such a good video. I'm running a 3080 gpu with a ryzen 5 3600 at 1440p on a 27inch monitor. I typically play at between 70 to 100 fps on modern titles. With Starfield I get anywhere from 50 fps in less condense areas and 30 to 35 fps in the cities. Absolutely wild

5950x and 3080TI ultra 1440P native for me. Still only get about 40-50 FPS in cities. Hoping for an update soon. In indoor or combat scenarios I do enjoy about 100 fps average

When is Phil going to do an editing video? His stuff is so clean!

There's a bug with upscaling, if you have it disabled the re-enable it again it won't work, you have to select a preset first to get it to work. You would think they would have fixed that simple issue with the last patch but apparently not.

Great info! I thought something was wrong with my 3080 only getting ~40 fps.

The low GPU utilisation on those lower end systems is due to being CPU limited! Thats why changing the settings made no difference. i did some testing / Benchmarking to understand how this game scales CPU with different limited metrics. Computer: Intel 13th Gen - 13900K, 32 Gigs DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s & nVidia 4090 MSI Suprim X on Windows 10. Below are the results: I found a good CPU limited situation in new Atlantis near the tree just after we walk up the stairs (right near where Jay and Phil were testing) There may be a tougher area later in the game but this worked well for me to test. The Game was set at at 1080p HUB optimised settings, with FSR2 and 50% resolution scale so the 4090 GPU was loaded 63%-73% utilisation so I could tell this was CPU limited (the bottleneck for FPS). Test set 1 - DDR 5 Memory Scaling. P Cores @ 5.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 115 FPS P Cores at 5.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 5600 MT/s = 105 FPS (28% less memory clock and 7.4% less performance) P Cores at 5.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 4400 MT/s = 96 FPS (63% less memory clock and 18% less performance) P Cores at 5.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 2933 MT/s = 76 FPS (145% less memory clock and 51% less performance) This shows there is some scaling with memory but not one to one. Also it shows you can cripple a 13900K with slow memory. Those hungry cores need feeding with good fast RAM. Test set 2 - CPU - Clock Rate Scaling (E Cores turned off so only P Cores are on) P Cores @ 5.7 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 117 FPS P Cores @ 5.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 115 FPS P Cores @ 5.0 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 105 FPS (10% less clock than 5.5 Ghz and 9.5% less performance) P Cores @ 4.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 100 FPS (22% less clock than 5.5 Ghz and 15% less performance) P Cores @ 4.0 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 90 FPS (37% less clock than 5.5 Ghz and 27% less performance) P Cores @ 3.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 80 FPS (57% less clock than 5.5 Ghz and 43% less performance) P Cores @ 3.0 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 70 FPS (83% less clock than 5.5 Ghz and 64% less performance) This shows there is good scaling with CPU clock rate, I managed to drop over half the fps performance by dropping the clock rate. It would be interesting if we could see if 6.5 Ghz continues to scale performance. - I'll leave that for someone with LN2 (Gamers Nexus). Test set 3 - Ecore Scaling - E Cores On vs Off. P Cores @ 5.5 Ghz + E Cores @ 4.2Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 125 FPS (9.5% more performance with E Cores on vs E Cores off) P Cores @ 5.5 Ghz & DDR5 @ 7200 MT/s = 115 FPS (9.5 % less performance with E cores turned off). I checked the E Cores load and the game was loading them over 55% so a good utilisation and it took some of the workload (15%-20%) off the P Cores. So they are working well in this game title. I hope you find this interesting!

I got the game recently, and I have the in between of minimum and recommended specs, running a 2070 super. For some reason my game seems to struggle as it freezes from time to time, and with some audio delays, I recently redownloaded it onto an SSD since most people have said it helped with performance.

I play with the 6800xt, and a Ryzen 5 7600x. Get 60fps in the cities and 80-90+ indoors. I use some mixed settings based on hardware unboxed advice. Also have fsr set to 65%. Runs really well and looks good IMO. I think the city is very dependent on the CPU more than the GPU.

All I can say, Jay, is... OUCH! At least Crysis was running a high end, new graphics engine that, at its base, outperformed Unreal Engine 3.x and other 3D engines at the time. edit: I don't feel so bad about my bottom end ryzen 3rd gen cpu and 1650 4gb GPU.

Great job standing up for the community. Great job for not letting game companies tell the small guys we need better hardware! GREAT job backing up your comment with proof. Todd literally just stood there and said yep we optimized it. Where are the numbers Todd?!

Thanks for the video! You just save me a ton of troublshooting!

7900X and a 3090FE and Im getting around 45-50 FPS in 1440p. Thought my system was missing something, but this sort of allayed my fears. Still playable and enjoyable, but looking forward to some improvement patches coming out in the future.

Suddenly really glad I decided to wait for reviews. I'll pick up the GOTY edition in a year or two after either the developers or modders have fully fleshed out and fixed everything (more likely modders... Again)

Oh baby, despite my rig being 8 years old and middling when I got it, it's still able to play Starfield on the lowest of low settings. Launching the game off a HDD because my SSD is too small, and playing on a 1060 3gb, it hasn't been the greatest of experiences for sure but hey, it works!

This game seems to be very memory bandwidth sensitive I would make a video on this!. I overclocked my ram from 3200 to 3800 and it seems to have helped a ton on frame drops overall

This issue popped up all the way back in Morrowind where the game bogs down in busy areas even when you have plenty of power to run the game.

Why do I need a better computer to play a Fallout 4 clone?

I wonder if the settings changes don't fully apply until the game is restarted, which would explain some of why the changes didn't appear to make that much of a difference on the fly.

What would change if you added a graphic mod on the PC's and ran the same bench mark. Would you get the better FPS. I'd like to see if it helps?

Have to say, using digital foundry recommended settings with some tweaks like modding DLSS (which keeps trophies active) and changing FOV my 3060ti runs pretty good at 70fps roughly

Thank you so much for making this video! I can now send this to people insisting that the game runs "smooth as butter" and that I need to upgrade the midrange PC I built this year.

I'm running an rtx 3070 and an r9 5900x with 64gb of ram. And in order to hit 60-70fps at 1440p, (something achievable in every other game with my hardware) I had to use the performance optimization mod combined with a dlss 2.5.1 mod. All things considered I have been having a great experience plus I haven't seen any bugs during my play through (yet).

The crazy thing is, Crisis was actually revolutionary for its time. Star field looks and plays like fallout 4, it’s just unoptimized

Is this frame rate issue linked to the streaming side of the game. I’m running it on my pc using game pass so it’s streaming with I’m guessing most of the processing being done remotely (there is no options set for the graphics setting). My pc is set up To a 43” 4K tv and it looks and feels great ? 🤷‍♂️

Great video and backs up what I noticed on my 10700k / 3090 build. I have little faith in Bethesday improving it though... fingers crossed

This is a great video, I thought I was crazy trying to get at least 60 FPS with my i5 13600k and my 3060Ti. Now I know it's the game not my hardware. Thank you Jay for the info!

I am getting between 30-40 FPS at 1440p low settings and 50 FPS at 1080P on my Amd Ryzen 5800X and EVGA 2060 KO Ultra with 3200 MHz DDR4 memory. I am not one to change settings too much and I will be playing the game the most on my Xbox Series S, thanks Jay for all your videos.

The only time I have seen a significant change in frame rate, is when I dropped shadows from ultra to high. It went up 20fps! I’m using a 6900XT at 3440x1440. Also, using FSR2 makes no change in the frame rate. I’m enjoying the game though!

I did an upgrade prior to the official launch from 3700X/3070 to 5800X3D/3090ti. My game runs pretty smoothly with occasional frame drops into the upper 50s, but for the most part, my average is probably around 70ish FPS with highs in the 110s, running everything on ultra except for shadows on high at 1080p. I'm well aware that these are above recommended specs, I just wish it was optimized better for older hardware. I was considering selling my 3070 and 3700X to a friend specifically to play this game, but now I'm not so sure how well it will run on my old hardware and if it will even be worth it for him.

I have an issue with my 4090, and I've seen similar reports, but even when the GPU is "maxed" it's only using about 250w of power where other games will pull the normal 350-450w+ depending on under/overclock settings. With my power and voltage settings, Returnal will use 350-375w on 98-99% GPU usage. With Starfield, it's about 250w with occasional spikes. Something is not right.

who is running the camera? Nick! because we love him!

I'm running a 3070TI, under voltage due to heat, with a memory OC to 10501 Mhz, a Ryzen 9 5900x, no OC and 32 GB RAM. 62 hours in game and the only place I get really low FPS is Jemison, especially around the MAST building, high 40s--mid 50s on high settings with motion blur and film grain off. 2560x1440. Everywhere else I'm getting between 58 all the way up to mid 90s, usually around 74. I've only CTD once. This is pretty low FPS for my system. Still need to try out the DLSS mod. That being said, I'm having a blast with this game.

Btw SSD is not only for loading times... I was thinking it is and I get lagging and interruptions in audio and random stutters here and there... and the game runs kinda OK on my RX 6600 (running around 37-40 to 55-60 fps depending on the scene) mix of medium and high with FSR set to 90% and sharpening set to max... anyways my 2TB SSD will be delivered tomorrow so that should sort the issue (I hope lol)

Cyberpunk was flagged as "the new Crysis" not just because of optimization but because it had a myriad of visual features that _still_ push most hardware to this day if you want to get max graphical settings, much like Crysis did, and has some serious eye candy to go with that tech despite some of its other problems. Starfield just... runs weird. Think this is less of a "new Crysis" situation and more of, like Jay said repeatedly throughout the video, just a really weirdly optimized game. (I'd say poorly but there's clearly _some_ optimization going on if GPU and CPU load changes with settings, but the frames don't seem to - almost like there's a target FPS the game engine determines based on hardware performance up front, and then continues to shoot for regardless of the setting changes and hardware power available. Another shitty port moment?)

I dunno... Are you using the newest version of MSI Afterburner and RTSS? I had 1 version behind and it was showing weird CPU stats until I updated it. It looked like the CPU wasn't utilized. After updating... On my laptop that's an i7 9750H with an RTX 2080, both CPU and GPU cap out and struggles to hold 45fps. My i7 5960X @ 4.2GHz (lol, below minimum) with an RTX 3080 Ti holds about 50~55fps in New Atlantis while my slightly newer i9 7900X @ 4.4GHz and RTX 3080 Ti holds about 60fps in New Atlantis. I get fairly full utilization on all of them. NONE of these looked right though until I updated MSI Afterburner to 4.6.5 / RTSS 7.3.4

This is why I always wait a few months till after a few updates, evaluation of things not optimized yet and a store discount

but crysis was intended to push systems and had the graphics to show off, I bet starfield system requirements will go down as they actually optimize and finish the game, well after release

6:15 I think New Atlantis area may hit the CPU harder. I am typically 99-100% on GPU with 7950X3D, 7900 XT, 1440p Ultra, FSR off. I typically get 80-100 FPS, depending on what's going on. Earlier today I was in the same spot you guys were (ramp coming out of the NAT below MAST) and noticed the GPU usage was dropping to like 90%. I have to think that there was just a lot of CPU intensive things going on (crowds?).

I have a 1080 on a 7700K, with 32 GB of DDR4 on a gen 3 m.2 ssd. I get 45-60+ fps depending on what I’m doing, at medium/high settings on 1080p. Is that good?

This channel helped me tremendously. Didn’t have a desktop for about a decade (before that was hand me down Macs). Saved up a bunch of money and decided to build the best PC I could. Binged watched this channel along with Linus and Gamers Nexus before work, on the train to work, during my lunch break, along with staying up late nearly every night learning. Did that for 2ish months and built the beast. That was about a year and a half ago. I’ve been enjoying Starfield and even with it’s crap optimization it’s been running fine. Thanks Jay, you da man.

They made absolutely no changes to the creation engine from 2015 in fallout 4, if anything made it worse.

I wish you picked the Nvidia parts to show off. Not only they're slower on paper, Nvidia in general performs extremely poorly in this game. Also only about a dozen people use AMD cards.

Thank you for the video. I'd suggest to try to achieve better sync between what viewers SEE and HEAR. Sometimes, talking is done about one configuration but camera shows another one. Maybe, just replace camera-man by tripod that shows both displays at the same time?

more vids like these thank you jay... Glad i can run starfield at max settings, game has alot of potential

Jay this was an amazing video to show what’s really going on. Apparently it doesn’t matter what your specs are, we all get the same crappy fps. Lol

How is noone talking about this besides Jay? I see a few people but this is embarrassing for other reviewers to leave this kind of info out. Does the game run 'ok', Yes, does it run the way a game that looks like this should, HELL NO.

What software do people use for those cpu and gpu counters ? Is that just afterburner ?

Two of my friends (with just above min Starfield spec PC's) installed onto a HDD. Both experienced stuttering and Audio (speech) sync issues, as well as loading times. Both corrected these issues by moving the game to an SSD. An SSD is an absolute requirement.

Jay, what is your take on why the disparity exists between those AMD and competitive specs, or the fact that Intel Arc was just declared to be "below minimums" even with their fastest card.

It's not so much the frame rate that bothers me on my 5800X3D + 6800 XT system, it's the flickering caused by what I would assume is poor frame times in cities when utilizing FreeSync.

Just discovered this channel. This video illustrates why you have the subscriber base you do.

With my i5-13600K and 6700XT in 1080P with everything set to ULTRA and FSR on never drops below 80FPS (tested in NEON city) and in most locations like the MAST District, it averages 120+ FPS. I'm amazed to see such high-end cards struggling.

Another thing that Starfield is really lacking are accessibillity features. Especially since it's a single player title there's basically no reason not to add them. Also what I've seen of the gameplay there are some things that can be highlighted so why not allow other things to be highlighted if the player needs/wants it.

I just upgraded to a 6750xt and it struggles to keep a steady 60fps at 1080p low. That is completely unacceptable for a GPU that is barely 1 generation old. Let alone one that can handle ray tracing in other games

9:39 I actually have a 3080 with a 12700k. On 1440p with the HUB optimized graphics settings, I'm getting around 50-55 FPS in New Atlantis.

What are the overlays used to see this information?? Very curious what my pc is running

It's running great. It is a next gen PC game, we really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it's got a lot of great stuff going on in it and the fans are responding awesome. -Todd Howard

According to Todd Howard they did optimize Starfield for PC. It was an article from PC Gamer I read last night. If they actually "optimized" this game for PC I really hate to see what it would of been like if they didn't optimize it. I really want to play this game but I think I'll hold off for a few weeks to see what happens.

I've found that at 1080p, I was better off setting everything at low and then render resolution at 100%. It gave me better performance and looked better than the HIGH preset. 🤣

I have a *i9-10850K and a 3070 (didn't find bottleneck websites until after building the system, could upgrade the CPU to better fix that, but it's great for my purposes atm, so dw), and I haven't yet bought the game for a few reasons, but hearing it's super unoptimized like Cyberpunk was makes me glad I haven't yet bought it. I was not super hyped like many for the game, but I like this style game so I definitely want to play it, and I'll wait until later in the future when they put out updates to make it run better.

Thanks for this test and commentary, great video! It definitely looks unoptimized ... I hope they patch it up instead of laughing it off and dismissing people. The graphics are inconsistent too, at times this game looks great, clothes and gear, indoor assets, then suddenly looks like an old game from 2015 with unsightly textures.

I can already tell you Jay, I am running on a i9-9900K, 2080 Ti, 64GB ram and I am averaging 30-40fps with constant lock up and crashes, all settings low and on 720p on a 1080p monitor. It sucks for a game to come out in 2023 with ETREMLEY poor optimization.

In my case, FSR does have a huge impact on my FPS, running the game at 1440p i get around 85 to 134 fps. Is this issue related on 1080p only? maby upscaling is bugged at this resolution, i have no idea but i dont have any of these problems myself, the GPU is 100% utilized most of the time. My specs are: Aorus X570 Elite AMD 5800X cpu 6800XT gpu 32GB RAM 3600mhz It is however running on a seperate nvme. non the less the game is poorly optimized indeed and im not impressed with the graphics too.

I just built a new system (in June) Ryzen 7900x / XFX RX 6800XT / Corsair Vengeance DDR5 64GB 6000MHz. I'm getting 152fps @1440p every thing maxed, motion blur off (cause F that) and FSR on. I got the game free with the Amazon deal on the graphic card, and have been playing it for a week. Never expected "Poor Performance" and "Not Optimized." A few bugs but 0 crashes.

I decided not to buy Starfield because the performance is so bad. This is one of those games that I will check on a year from now and maybe get it after it has been fixed.

I have a 1080ti and it's the first game that is awful on it. I was a bit confused because although it's an old card now, it always plays a game at decent settings in 1080p. This was straining to play it. Yeah it's got to be the optimisation because other games are fine on the 1080ti

Running it just fine with a 3070ti at 1080p native high. Getting drops to high 40s inside big cities, but during actual gameplay i am getting anywhere between 60 and 120 fps, like in open planets or dungeons and the game looks great.

The game runs incredible on a 3090 for me, I run the DLSS mod and at 4k I’m above 60FPS in most places except random planets.

6700xt and 5600x here. The initial settings had me over 100 fps @ 1440p in the city and looked like an old game. Tried HUB's "quality" settings and frames dropped to 55-60 but looked way better. Still need to tweak a little.

" We did optimize it you just have to buy a better pc"- Todd Howard known liar

What performance overlay software are you using?

What chair is Jay using?