TECH NEWS – Despite a generally positive reception, Starfield has been a bit divisive. Especially the technical aspects of the game…
Many were impressed by Bethesda’s new epic space RPG Starfield. The story, the visuals and the scope of possibilities are truly amazing. But others are less enthusiastic, criticising the game’s fast travel solution, frequent loading screens or even the frame rate.
Prior to the game’s release, Bethesda confirmed that Starfield would only run at 30fps. This announcement caused a surprisingly big stir. For a galaxy of this size, a 30fps limit is undoubtedly to be expected, especially if that limit results in more stable performance.
Many are still disappointed that Starfield does not have a 60fps performance mode, which is seen in most modern releases.
The Digital Foundry team (via GameSpot) experimented with whether the Xbox Series X could run the game at 60fps. It appears that it can. To test the theory, Digital Foundry had to build a new console. This essentially copies the Series X but uses the AMD 4800S Desktop Kit. Meanwhile, the GPU was also replaced with an RX 6700 (since there is no exact match for the Xbox RDNA 2 core).
It turned out that running Starfield with FSR 2 enabled sometimes resulted in a 60fps display. All this without dynamic resolution scaling. However, with Digital Foundry, 60fps was only achievable in a closed environment. Most of the game still ran between 30 and 40fps.
However, when the team lowered the resolution to 1440p, which is the same as on the Xbox Series S, the game ran steadily at 40fps, occasionally increasing to 60fps.
Digital Foundry added that Bethesda could then feasibly release a 40fps mode for a 120Hz display. Especially for those with VRR screens.
This is not an experiment we can quickly reproduce ourselves at home. Starfield is still locked and optimised for 30fps, but it’s interesting to see that there’s a possibility to push it further.
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