What Todd Howard said in this interview (“We optimized it for PC. It runs great, you may need to upgrade your PC for the game”), has been refuted with concrete facts!

Starfield has poor I/O performance, proven in the video below by Compusemble, which shows it stuttering on the latest SSDs. These SSDs are PCIe Gen5, and not many motherboards still support this speed. Bethesda has previously suggested installing your game on SSDs, but the video attests that the SSD is receiving much more data than it needs, creating a “bottleneck” in performance, i.e. here is where your config’s performance is being held back.

Compusemble tested thoroughly on New Atlantis, as it’s a popular and graphically demanding location in Todd Howard’s new game. The results were shocking: the SSD was 100% utilized by Starfield, which caused the GPU to underperform, dropping to 0% utilization in some places. If it were an old SSD, it might be understandable because of its age, but the Crucial T700 Gen5 SSD is one of the fastest on the market… and it isn’t enough for Starfield!?

The bottom line is that SSDs need a certain block size to deliver maximum performance, but it was too small and therefore could not reach 555 MB/s. Not sure if it is why the Starfield tends to stutter, but anyone can test how much they are using the SSD in their machine. The solution is not in our hands, but in the hands of Bethesda Game Studios. They need to fix this bug, because it can’t be fixed with a mod.

Oh, and going back to the comment from Howard linked at the very beginning: it used to be a meme how his statements were put on the song Sweet Little Lies. It didn’t take him long to add to the list. PCIe Gen5 SSDs shouldn’t have such a high utilization rate, because they can have very fast read and write speeds (read speed is 14000 MB/s instead of the theoretical 8000 MB/s)!

Source: WCCFTech