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Bethesda’s Todd Howard on Starfield PC optimization: “You may need to upgrade your PC”

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In an interview with Bloomberg, Todd Howard claimed that Bethesda has optimized Starfield for PC, and that PC gamers may need to upgrade their PCs in order to enjoy it.

As Todd Howard said when asked why Bethesda hasn’t optimized Starfield for PC.

“We did, it’s running great. It’s a next-gen PC game. We really 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 there and the fans’ response is awesome.”

Starfield does not feature any Ray Tracing effects so I don’t know how the game is pushing the technology. To its credit, Starfield has a great LOD system. However, the game’s graphics are inconsistent. In some scenes, it can look great and in other scenes, it can look really bad.

Starfield has trouble running with 60fps in 4K even on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. Additionally, the performance gains when lowering the in-game settings are minimal. Not only that but the game lacks native support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 and Intel XeSS. So yeah, contrary to what Howard says, the game does actually have some optimization issues. And I don’t want to be the one pointing out, but I don’t really see anything next-gen-ish in Starfield. Ironically, Star Citizen, a game that is actually pushing the graphical boundaries of PC graphics, looks and runs better than Starfield, even in its current beta phase.

As we wrote in our PC Performance Analysis.

“Starfield is a mixed bag. On one hand, we were really impressed by the CPU multithreading capabilities of the Creation Engine 2. However, especially for older CPUs, the game would greatly benefit from DLSS 3. Yes, there is a DLSS 3 mod but it’s a f’king paid mod. Then there is FSR 2.0 which is the only available upscaling technique. Ironically, FSR 2.0 looks worse than XeSS or DLSS 2. And while Starfield runs great on AMD’s hardware, its performance on NVIDIA’s GPUs is horrible.

Bethesda’s collaboration with AMD had actually a negative effect on the quality of the PC version. The game is missing a lot of graphics/display settings, and it looks washed out. Bethesda should further optimize Starfield via post-launch updates to improve overall performance. Or at least the team should make the game scale on older GPUs.”

Let’s hope that Todd’s comments won’t mean a complete lack of PC performance patches. Oh, who am I kidding? That’s exactly what Howard implied so don’t expect any major optimization improvements!

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