> No, you shouldn't have to install this game on an SSD in order to avoid video or audio stuttering. No, you should most definitely NOT upgrade your NVIDIA 1080, 20xx or 30xx something card in order to play this crap.
Oh please. An SSD and a modern video card are the price of entry for AAA games.
That’s just PC gaming with AAA titles. They’re made to have the best graphics possible, not cater to old hardware. If someone doesn’t like it, consoles are a great value. They can also play any number of older games released over past years that are now heavily discounted.
Complaining that a blockbuster AAA title doesn’t work well on mechanical HDDs in 2023 is one of the weirder critiques I’ve heard. This person is just out to complain and/or would be better off on consoles.
> Take a look at the remastered PC versions of Crysis, they all look fantastic and they all run really well even on an old NVIDIA 1050 Ti GPU.
Crysis was released in 2007. The NVIDIA 1000 series came out a decade later. Of course it runs well. What point is the author trying to make? This whole article is strange.
Yeah, the console this game was optimized for (Xbox Series X) has SSD storage and was released concurrent with the Nvidia 30XX series. 2020 console specs seem like a reasonable target.
My son plays Starfield on a nvidia 1060GT 6GB and the game runs easily at 30-40 fps on medium settings. Everything else on the computer is very modern though.
Starfield is fine. It actually runs pretty smoothly, just not at 4k 120fps. A lot of AAA games these days require a DLSS-like solution to run well, which is kind of frustrating but we are already a few years into the roll out and its only a matter of time before it is ubiquitous. There is also a problem with tech IP lockout: Bethesda made a deal with AMD where they would support AMDs Super Resolution tech, the terms of which required them to not officially support NVidia DLSS. There are however Mods you can install to support DLSS.
An interesting sidebar there is that allegedly, a popular community modder was given advanced access to the game, allegedly so that DLSS support would be available near launch.
Anyway idk man, all these issues are manageable. Its janky but its fun jank.
I'm playing it because I got it for free(read: Game Pass). The glitches are bad, the writing is pretty bad despite having good moments, the progression is pretty shoddy.
Everything I've heard is that this is the least buggy release for a Bethesda game ever. This does not mean it doesn't have serious quality problems; it means Bethesda has never managed to do better, and people love their games despite that. Expectations have been satisfied, because they started low. The savvy gamer knows to wait 6 to 18 months before playing.
> Expectations have been satisfied, because they started low.
I am a huge Elder Scrolls fan (Oblivion, Skyrim) and I loved Fallout 3. It was possible to excuse the jank in those games because they were innovative and immersive.
I didn't find this to be the case with Starfield. In a vacuum where only Bethesda games exist Starfield is an improvement, but in relation to other experiences Bethesda games are now severely behind. It's especially noticeable if you play a game like Baldur's Gate 3 and compare the two.
I'm still playing BG3 as well, and I have no plans to pick up Starfield until next year at the earliest. This was my plan from the beginning, because we can't rely on Bethesda to release quality craft. People should adjust to this by not buying their games on release. Poor sales is the only language they speak.
I've been thinking about enjoying games despite their flaws a lot lately in the context of game criticism.
The extreme reactionary behavior of the gamer populace as a whole--even to something as mild as pointing out an issue in a game's menu design--is unsettling. Every time I play a multiplayer game and either I or someone else mentions--in the most dispassionate tone possible--something we think is an issue with the game or an idea for a way to improve it, at least one (and usually several) people react as though we're saying the game is trash. They almost always say something like "then go play something else". It's incredibly consistent. Because of this kind of stuff, I mostly stick to single player games and stay away from game-specific communities[1].
I don't see this kind of thing to anywhere near this degree in any of the other hobby/interest circles I'm exposed to. People seem happy to discuss issues in their favorite shows, movies, and books. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is just due to the population I'm exposed to of people who discuss games (I assume) skewing significantly younger than those for other hobbies.
[1] the only gaming community I do hang around are the comment sections of Rock Paper Shotgun articles. The people there seem in general just much more willing to accept critiques of games
While I agree with the general sentiment, and think some egregious cases should even be handled as false advertisement / fraud, picking out Starfield as an example of what changed for the worse is odd, since Bethesda games have been riddled with bugs for at least two decades now.
I RTFA, and this is not my experience. I just built a new gaming PC for about $900 with an AMD Radeon 6700 XT and the game runs smooth at 4K on the default high setting, about 50 fps normally. An SSD has been expected for AAA gaming for years. The game, as a game, is fine. I'm not saying you should like it, but if you don't like it then it's probably because you don't like the genre. As the article mentions, it's pretty derivative material within its genre, not exactly breaking a lot of new ground. This is fine. I have experienced no bugs whatsoever. I like the way it looks.
>The game suffers an endless amount of video and audio stuttering issues unless you run it from an SSD or an NVMe (even then some people still experience stuttering problems).
This has been an issue with many games for a while. Diablo 3 ran like dog shit and had audio issues on HDDs. TF2 runs like shit on HDDs.
This entire article is "Waaaahhhh I should be able to play modern Triple A games on shitty hardware"
I don't think so. I can understand SSD/HDD difference and SSD requirement, which is probably due to tons of random, small reads.
Yet, Valve has shown us it's possible to have great graphics, atmosphere and playability with modest hardware with HL2 series.
They tuned it so hard, so it crashed on AMD systems like crazy in the beginning. They called gamers to their labs and debugged on real hardware when this happened. I remember installing 3+ hotfixes a day.
They did HDR on a card (Radeon 9600XT) which supposedly can't do these things and ran with almost no performance penalty.
I believe so many things can be optimized further, yet it's not seen worthy of the effort. When games are made for passion, but not for money primarily, everybody wins. When you want to milk something as quickly as possible, this happens.
I have SDDs but my Steam library is on HDDs for cost efficiency. It's not "shitty" hardware, it's actually a reasonable choice. I'm sure has hell not going to futz around with copying the current game I want to play from HDD to SSD each time my mood changes.
That said, I have 64 GB of RAM and use Primo Cache to cache my Steam drive, so I don't generally notice any stuttering after maybe the first minute of the game.
I tried playing on my gaming PC with a 3080 and an NVMe. It gives me major nausea, something that has never happened to me before (and I had a VR startup where I spent all day in a headset!).
I really wanted to dive into this game but I guess I’ll wait to see if something improves. From what I heard performance isn’t great on intel and NVIDIA machines.
I still have a few hard drives in my computer for things I don't really care about. Hard drives last for ages and a computer used for most professional work doesn't need much more than 250GB of SSD storage. Using an old hard drive for games has worked well for me for ages, even Cyberpunk ran fine from a hard drive for me.
Having to upgrade your system because one game doesn't handle hard drives well sucks. Previously, many games were huge because they repeated assets on disk so that hard drives could load them up faster. With the SSD requirement, this is no longer the case. Logically, the game should be much smaller because of that, but it's still huge.
There's an easy solution for all of this, though: just don't buy the game. If the game wasn't built to your liking or your computer can't handle it, you can simply not spend money on it and play something else.
It’s not that I store only games on my computer, but backups, photography and legacy stuff takes space. Especially, if you’re into computers for ~30 years.
> Nowadays PC gamers are used as guinea pigs when big gaming titles are released with major bugs, major performance issues, and other similar problems.
Gamers are also very vocal when games are delayed as well.
The developers cant really win!
PCs have such variation in configurations and quality that games are bound to suffer, the price you pay for hardware freedom is that games sometimes aren’t optimised for your environment.
(Games are also getting bigger and bigger with no guarantee that it will sell so decisions need to be made)
There are so many great games out there which can run on anything 64bit, that I'm still letting my old desktop PC chug along with its 740 and whichever harddisks I've had thrown at me over the years.
Might upgrade at some point to try some of these high profile releases, but I have to say I don't find it appealing enough to go through the hassle atm.
Totally agree with the comments that it’s weird to expect an AAA game to work ok on HDD in 2023.
If you don’t want to pay for an expensive video card, just buy an XBox for $300 and be happy:).
I still remember my intel 1st gen 80gb ssd. Who doesn't run ssds?
>Not only did I run into the ridicules hard-coded GPU check, that continuously fail for thousands of users that DO fulfill the minimum GPU requirements,
From what I read this was a common linux problem, though not for myself. For me nvidia gpu + linux = no starfield. So I went and bought a new amd gpu.
I had a few troubles but once the game would actually launch it has been running quite smoothly. I have found some bugs which seem not-linux-related. Expected Im guessing.
SSDs aren't new technologies and nvme drives can be found at similar or lower prices than ssd. so in this case, Todd Howard is correct, upgrade your PC. cyberpunk's new update is also dropping support for HDD
> Starfield is a big game, yes, but what exactly is it about it that makes so much better that it require so much more hardware power?
I'm amazed how I triggered you so hard, you are now crufting through all of my comment history, downvoting and commenting like a maniac.
Imagine being this dense and still incapable of defining "normal" as a high school student during statistics class would.
And you know why I'm taking a stance? Because people like you make me to. I have no choice, a few years ago I was told "Oh these pronouns? Yeah just ignore it if you are cis, no worries." But now I get banned from a mod site if I upload a modded INI file removing it from my single player game, where no one is affected by my decision to remove it. Cancelled by people like you who claim to be the "good guys". Fascism is back, but now a different flavor, thanks.
Now think about that after you ruined my day by stalking me.
You've been breaking the HN guidelines extremely badly in this thread and others. We ban accounts that do that. Please don't do it again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
Edit: it also looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's another line at which we ban accounts, regardless of what you're for or against. (For past explanations on this point see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). If you want to continue commenting on HN, we need you to stop this pattern, as it also breaks HN's rules.
I haven't downvoted you in either thread (and unsure why you care about that so much), you seem to have more issues than I assumed, work on yourself, for your own good.
> Fascism is back, but now a different flavor, thanks.
You've been breaking the HN guidelines extremely badly in this thread and others. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop—regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.
Edit: we had to warn you about this already (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347094) and you've continued to do more of the same. If this keeps up, we'll have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this.
This is probably the noisiest topic of all of them (where "noise" means there is a lot of dishonesty and hatred and petty sociopolitical tribalism masquerading among the honest argument).
I haven't read this article, but I am open to an argument that trans pronouns could have negative effects, and giving the article the benefit of the doubt (that it's honest): I feel completely confident that the people uploading a mod to remove something trans- or gay-related from a video game are part of the noise, and are not honestly trying to support the argument you have linked, and are doing more harm in spreading hatred than theoretical good.
I'm not sure what made anyone think running Starfield from an SSD makes a difference. Perhaps there is a performance floor that describes Runs-Like-Ass, but having an SSD drive on my gaming PC (ryzen even) did not provide any sort of performance benefit.
I made the mistake of, admittedly accidently, throwing Starfield onto a spinning disk drive.
Load times were approximately 5-10 minutes from button click to start, any conversation that was initiated either ran through all of the audio dialogue and then ran the animations for said dialogue or did the reverse. Any time combat started the game would freeze completely and then start again.
I realized my mistake and moved Starfield over to my nvme and load times dropped to about 1 minute, and I never saw any of the other issues again. It was like I spent my whole life living in a cave staring at shadows and then found my self on the surface seeing the sun for the first time.
Oh please. An SSD and a modern video card are the price of entry for AAA games.
That’s just PC gaming with AAA titles. They’re made to have the best graphics possible, not cater to old hardware. If someone doesn’t like it, consoles are a great value. They can also play any number of older games released over past years that are now heavily discounted.
Complaining that a blockbuster AAA title doesn’t work well on mechanical HDDs in 2023 is one of the weirder critiques I’ve heard. This person is just out to complain and/or would be better off on consoles.
> Take a look at the remastered PC versions of Crysis, they all look fantastic and they all run really well even on an old NVIDIA 1050 Ti GPU.
Crysis was released in 2007. The NVIDIA 1000 series came out a decade later. Of course it runs well. What point is the author trying to make? This whole article is strange.