Starfield is right now available to those who have purchased its Digital Premium and Constellation Editions. As such, we’ve decided to benchmark the game and share our initial performance impressions. Can the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 run Starfield at Native 4K/Max Settings with constant 60fps? Time to find out.
For our initial Starfield 4K benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit and the GeForce 536.99 driver. Furthermore, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Starfield does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. As such, we’ve decided to benchmark the New Atlantis city. This is the biggest city of the game, featuring a lot of NPCs. Thus, it can give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game will run. The area we chose to benchmark is this one. From what we could tell, this was the most demanding scene in New Atlantis.
As you can see, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is unable to push constant 60fps in this populated area. Do note that we’ve recorded the video with NVIDIA Shadowplay which brings an additional 1-3fps impact. Without recording, this area was running with a minimum of 53fps.
This isn’t the only area in which the framerate drops below 60fps though. During dialogues, we often saw our framerate drop to the 50s. Not only that but Starfield has other GPU-heavy scenes that can also drop the framerate to 53-55fps. Here are some screenshots to back up our claims.
In short, no. At Native 4K/Max Settings, NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card is unable to provide a constant 60fps experience. Again, there are multiple areas in which the framerate drops. However, the good news is that during combat we were able to maintain framerates above 60fps. So while technically Starfield can drop below 60fps, it’s at least enjoyable, especially if you use a G-Sync monitor.
Stay tuned for our PC Performance Analysis (which will hopefully go live this weekend)!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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