Starfield's poor performance might just be due to it not utilizing GPUs properly

Starfield was released worldwide on September 6, 2023, to largely positive reviews. However, the space RPG from Bethesda Game Studios has also been entangled in controversy of late, especially with regard to its abysmally poor performance on PC. The PC version has a lot of issues, resulting in poor framerate even across high-end hardware.

This puzzling situation can now perhaps be better understood thanks to new discoveries by the VKD3D dev. In short, the game has a significant optimization problem for GPUs, the details of which will be revealed below.

Note: Parts of this article are subjective and reflect the author’s opinions.

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VKD3D dev discovers the reason why Starfield is so unoptimized on PC

In case you wanted to know a few reasons on why Starfield is so unoptimized. byu/Nefsen402 inpcmasterrace

As detailed in the Reddit post by user Nefsen402, Starfield on PC possesses a multitude of GPU-related optimization bugs. The issues are summarized below for reference:

• The game is prone to crashing due to incorrect memory allocation. This is caused when the memory assigned does not meet the CPU page size - causing a driver crash, especially with unoptimized GPU drivers.
• A DX12 feature, “ExecuteIndirect” is misused by the game. ExecuteIndirect works by calling in several “hints” from a game to provide relevant information to the GPU drivers.
• Starfield has been seen to send out unnecessary, redundant calls that confuse the GPU drivers. As a result, the GPU drivers create a “bubble” within its command queue.
• Bubbles greatly slow down the GPU driver, making it fall back and recalculate everything - resulting in stutter and FPS drops.
• This problem is further compounded by the game choosing to release ExecuteIndirect calls simultaneously, instead of in batches.

These issues highlight a major flaw in Bethesda’s programming and are provided courtesy of the VKD3D developer - HansKristian-Work.

This revelation is rather surprising given Bethesda’s stance on the game requiring significantly powerful hardware on PC when confronted about its abysmal performance. In the end, it would seem that the community will have to fix up these issues on their own, given there has been no official statement or prior acknowledgment from Bethesda.

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Upcoming mods might drastically improve Starfield’s performance on PC

All may not be lost, however, as the unearthed information may eventually lead to mods that help solve Starfield’s performance woes on PC.

Performance-enhancing mods for the game are already available at the time of writing this article - such as the DLSS injection mod. However, none of these mods go beyond .ini file changes, offering essentially minor performance boosts.

A batch of mods are expected to be made available that incorporate these fixes. Keep in mind that these may take some time to appear, as the scope of these fixes is quite large.