Even the fastest SSDs you can buy might not be good enough for Starfield which makes upgrading your PC a little harder

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But Todd Howard says it's optimized and you should upgrade anyway

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(Image credit: Bethesda)

What you need to know

  • For as good a game as Starfield is at its core, the PC gaming community hasn't all been too thrilled with its performance. 
  • A YouTuber has run some tests with a PCIe 5.0 SSD that shows even the absolute fastest storage you can get still isn't enough. 
  • After many took exception to Bethesda's Todd Howard saying we should just upgrade our PCs, what exactly are we supposed to upgrade to?!
Read More Starfield

Starfield

(Image credit: Bethesda)

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Starfield is certainly the hot topic in gaming land right now and while a lot of it is fun (it is, after all, a good game at its core), the PC gaming community has been poking and prodding at the game quite a bit. This latest video that has surfaced shows something pretty remarkable, and that's a suggestion even the absolute fastest storage a consumer can buy right now isn't necessarily enough for this game. 

Surfaced on Reddit, the video from Compusemble on YouTube shows Starfield being played on a system with a brand spanking new, ridiculously fast PCIe 5.0 SSD. And yet, the system is still hitting the wall. 

The video below demonstrates what seems to be happening with the "traversal stutter" and that it might not just be down to your CPU when it occurs. 

The testing in the video suggests that in some larger cities in Starfield, SSD usage is hitting 100%, followed by a drop in GPU usage and then stuttering. To think a PCIe 5.0 SSD is being maxed out is pretty crazy. More curious is that the throughput is apparently far below the maximum that the SSD is capable of, and a comparison is drawn later with Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Here, the throughput is higher, but SSD usage is much lower. 

Presumably, per Todd Howard's "upgrade your PC" approach, we're going to need as yet unreleased hardware for Starfield? 

Jokes aside, it's interesting data. There's also another thread on Reddit which summarizes some other interesting information that could allude to another reason behind disappointing PC performance. 

In case you wanted to know a few reasons on why Starfield is so unoptimized. from r/pcmasterrace

It does feel like Starfield's PC version has been a bit of an afterthought, and I think it'd be fair for a lot of PC gamers to feel a little hard done by. Those with the absolute most powerful beastly rigs are probably having a great time, but the rest of us, aka, the masses, do have legitimate reasons to feel disappointed. Trust me, I'm an Intel Arc user, I feel all the pain. 

While we wait for PCIe 6.0 SSDs, so we can upgrade our rigs to handle Starfield, it would be nice if instead of sound bites from the developer, we got some kind of commitment to make the game better. I don't know about you, but I'd definitely prefer that. 

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Richard Devine
Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • fjtorres5591
    Are they using DirectStorage?
    The game is clearly optimized...for AMD.
    Digital Forge already proved that so the logical take is the game was developed for XBOX's flavor of DirectX and PC got a port.

    Not too different from what PC and XBOX gamers get with games using PS5 as the target when, somehow, the stronger hardware pergorms no better (and on ocassion worse) than the weakest because of the code approaches used. Sort of "most favored nation" software development.

    Not fair but economically driven in both cases.
    STARFIELD *is* optimized for both platforms but "some platforms are more equal". As in it absolutely positively needed to run well on XBOX (and Cloud) from day one, while PC gamers are (sadly) used to "bugthesda" and using mods from day two and "can wait on bug fixes". 😕
    Priorities.
    Reply
  • Looming Dementia
    I just installed the game, and off I went. The SSD I installed the game to reads at about 5 GB/sec, nowhere near the fastest SSD on the market. I'm pretty sure that if I'd installed it on my slightly slower OS drive, it would perform admirably.

    What is the writer of the article talking about? I bet he installed the SSDs into a laptop with a sub-optimal CPU or something along those lines.

    Just stick in a middling SSD, and don't push the settings above what your hardware can handle. You'll be fine. I stuck a middling SSD into a system with an RTX 4080 and a very fast hyperthreaded 12-core CPU. Maxed every setting with FSR 2 enabled at 75%, and I run through New Atlantis at 4K 70+ FPS, with a very good 99% FPS and zero visible hitches.

    The writer of this article is doing something very, very wrong.
    Reply
  • fjtorres5591
    Looming Dementia said:
    I just installed the game, and off I went. The SSD I installed the game to reads at about 5 GB/sec, nowhere near the fastest SSD on the market. I'm pretty sure that if I'd installed it on my slightly slower OS drive, it would perform admirably.

    What is the writer of the article talking about? I bet he installed the SSDs into a laptop with a sub-optimal CPU or something along those lines.

    Just stick in a middling SSD, and don't push the settings above what your hardware can handle. You'll be fine. I stuck a middling SSD into a system with an RTX 4080 and a very fast hyperthreaded 12-core CPU. Maxed every setting with FSR 2 enabled at 75%, and I run through New Atlantis at 4K 70+ FPS, with a very good 99% FPS and zero visible hitches.

    The writer of this article is doing something very, very wrong.
    Just curious: Intel or AMD CPU?
    RAM?
    The game *is* CPU bound.
    Reply
  • Looming Dementia
    fjtorres5591 said:
    Just curious: Intel or AMD CPU?
    RAM?
    The game *is* CPU bound.
    Yeah, I know that it chews up a CPU that's below recommended specs. The listed required CPU is NOT enough, really. Not even close, for any game settings.

    It's an AMD ... uhhhhhh. It isn't an X3D. Can't remember the model, and I'm not at home to look. It's a 12/24-core with a max clock speed just short of 6 GHz. Plenty of cache in a CPU like that, of course.

    Will an Intel wafer with similar numbers really run worse than what I have? I would think perhaps it might run slightly higher in terms of utilization, but it should still be well within tolerances, right?

    I would think that the Nvidia GPU would be more of an issue. The drivers aren't great, yet (but not as bad as the Intel ARC drivers). We should see serious improvement over the next couple of months of driver updates.

    I have 32 GB of DDR5. I was contemplating 64, but no games are going to utilize more than 32, for at least the next 6 or 7 years. I'll be building a new PC around that time, when the 70-series comes out.

    And say, if an Intel CPU makes the game run much worse, we shouldn't be blaming the SSD, right? 😄
    Reply
  • fjtorres5591
    Looming Dementia said:
    Yeah, I know that it chews up a CPU that's below recommended specs. The listed required CPU is NOT enough, really. Not even close, for any game settings.

    It's an AMD ... uhhhhhh. It isn't an X3D. Can't remember the model, and I'm not at home to look. It's a 12/24-core with a max clock speed just short of 6 GHz. Plenty of cache in a CPU like that, of course.

    Will an Intel wafer with similar numbers really run worse than what I have? I would think perhaps it might run slightly higher in terms of utilization, but it should still be well within tolerances, right?

    I would think that the Nvidia GPU would be more of an issue. The drivers aren't great, yet (but not as bad as the Intel ARC drivers). We should see serious improvement over the next couple of months of driver updates.

    I have 32 GB of DDR5. I was contemplating 64, but no games are going to utilize more than 32, for at least the next 6 or 7 years. I'll be building a new PC around that time, when the 70-series comes out.

    And say, if an Intel CPU makes the game run much worse, we shouldn't be blaming the SSD, right? 😄
    Dunno. But the DIGITAL FOUNDRY video showed significant differences with AMD doing on CPU and GPU and Intel doing really poorly on the GPU side.

    Hard to tell what is going on other than AMD being *very* helpful and Intel and Nvidia...not as much.

    (There's a reason XBOXes run on AMD while the original ran on Intel and Nvidia. The..kind...explanation at the time--360 era--was that Intel and Nvidia saw XBOX as a client and AMD and IBM as a partner. That might have changed...)
    Reply