According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
The problem is so severe, in fact, that the aforementioned translation layer had to be updated specifically to handle Starfield as an exception to the usual handling of the issue.
“I had to fix your shit in my shit because your shit was so fucked that it fucked my shit”
This is how games and drivers have been for decades.
There are huge teams at AMD and nVidia who’s job it is to fix shit game code in the drivers. That’s why (a) they’re massive and (b) you need new drivers all the time if you play new games.
I read an excellent post a while ago here, by Promit.
https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/5215019/
It’s interesting to see that in the 8 years since he wrote it, the SLI/Crossfire solution has simply been to completely abandon it, and that we still seem to be stuck in the same position for DX12. Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
I’ll give a different perspective on what you said: dx12 basically moved half of the complexity that would normally be managed by a driver, to the game / engine dev, which already have too much stuff to do: making the game. The idea is that “the game dev knows best how to optimize for its specific usage” but in reality the game dev have no time to deal with hardware complexity and this is the result.
Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
Yes they do. We know they do because current gen consoles are frequently providing better fidelity and better stability than PC games. Not because PCs have inferior hardware. But because optimization is actually incredibly hard when your custom base is all running different hardware AND different drivers. So even when the hardware is “the same”, it’s not.
This has been true forever. It just took 30 years for high performance computing to be affordable enough to put in consoles. 30 years was a long time for PC gamers to feel superior. Now they enjoy humble pie and make comments like this on the internet to explain why things are so “bad”.
PC games are still great. Don’t let this bother you more than it should.
To attribute this most recent failure to an overabundance of hardware variety is a joke. This issue persists on all Nvidia and Intel cards. Why? Because it’s an oversight pertaining to one thing they all share in common: their shared interaction with DirectX.
Let me repeat myself for the people in the back. The number of items they had to account for with this failure is one. One API.
This sounds more like hardware manufacturers haven’t provided a good enough abstraction layer across their devices, or they did (vulkan) but everyone is just stuck on bad apis that don’t properly map to the abstractions for the hardware. Or even more likely the publishers cheaped out and pushed something to release when it wasn’t ready like they have been forever.
It’s also a lack of specialized talent. There’s lots of great “talent” at game devs and even middleware devs. There’s just not much great talent that deals with renderers and API development. The vast majority of devs just lean on the middleware developer to push out the renderer codebase. In a situation like Bethesda running their own studio engine, they just don’t have the right people for it. This plagued the 90’s when people were trying to code for Glide, OGL, DX5,6,7,8, and 9. Many studios folded because they couldn’t get their tech to work with hardware acceleration.
There’s just not much great talent that deals with renderers and API development.
*for current wage
Excellent point.
Lol
Pc gaming is and forever will be way better then games on consoles.
Why?
I’ve 3 letters for you.
R G B
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
tbf pc gaming was always a fight for performance, I never felt superior back in the day fighting with qemm, irqs for the soundblaster or glide3d, it’s always had been a shitshow. It was a super shitshow in the nineties, it was a bit better in the zero’s and nowadays it again became a tad better.
But somehow I enjoyed that shitshow. Still do.
As far as wedding vows go, they’re not the MOST romantic… 🤷
As far as I know that’s what graphics drivers do, like, all the time. Every major title is handled specifically. I am not a developer. I heard this from engine developers
They released on two different platforms. PCs have so much variation in hardware, it’s not surprising there are issues with it.
It’s poorly optimized code, and the comments from the top brass has been “lol your PC sux” when they can’t even get it running right on their own hardware.
It’s not the variations of PC that’s the issue, it’s a design and quality control issue. Direct X and Vulkan are the bread and butter of PC gaming. Microsoft developed direct X to establish a common graphics framework for Windows and Microsoft game studio still fucked up working with it.
common graphics framework for Windows
They could have picked Khronos’ APIs. They think they are smarter than everyone else including GPU developers.
This is just classic corpo shit, developing their own proprietary stuff when no one asked for it. Apple with Metal too. Then it falls on developers to write abstraction layers
I’ll play in a year after most of the bug and performance issues are fixed. Which seems like my typical response to any major game release these days; just wait a few months at first.
Armored Core VI and Baldur’s Gate III are two big recently published games that do work quite well. They stand on the shoulders of two respectable companies.
Yea BG3 is amazing, but I still waited at least a couple of weeks before touching it.
Waiting is what I would do when I had to wait for allowance. I can wait now too!
I’ve played it a little on Xbox since it’s on gamepass and I haven’t encountered any bugs, other than a single game crash. Is the PC release significantly worse than console?
Doesn’t feel revolutionary but I’m enjoying it. Created Amos Burton and it’s a pretty fun playthru so far.
Edit: Okay so let me correct that to replicatible crashes after xbox captures (both screenshots and recordings).
I’m having no issues on PC either.
I’ve had 0 hard crashes but a few soft crashes since entering the final stretch of the MSQ. Sarah and Walter are stuck “talking” to each other permanently despite Sarah being in my ship and Walter the lodge. And if I try to talk to either of them the game locks up whenever it’s time for the other npc to chime in and I have to reload. I also had a random soft crash where I couldn’t enter the lodge from new Atlantis no matter what I did until I restarted the .exe(I’m thinking it’s related to the convos bug I’m experiencing). Also the weird movement bugs like someone walking away from you during a convo or crew members floating in or through random places in my ship. Also have a flashing texture issue for a few seconds after accessing the inventories in the armory ship habs.
Outside that I’m getting 50-70 fps with mostly high settings at 1080p.
Try Armored Core 6, 100% worth it day one
Sadly not my kind of game, but thank you!
As audial, it takes free labor for Bethesda to get their shit working the way it’s supposed to. What a garbage developer.
Builds out thousands of hours well written, acted, and intricately laid out rpg content that people are immediately sinking hundreds of hours into, has minor technical issues
What a garbage developer
What a garbage commenter
Bethesda is sub-par in just about every aspect of game development. Shallow combat. Basic dialogue trees. Skill/feats haven’t evolved in several games. Engine so old it has to have loading screens for every type of transition.
But you picked the story and acting to tout as good? Bethesda is well-known to have pathetically bad main-story arcs. Only a handful of side quests end up being engaging to most people. The face animations are…better now but still deeply in the uncanny valley. Their acting is usually deadpan with only the merest speck of emotion and shown as if the actor is reading their script for the first time during recording.
Honestly the main thing that Bethesda games have going for them are a detailed, hand-crafted world that is fun to explore and experiment in. Which…Bethesda handily disposed of to have the majority of its world and worlds be procedurally generated.
developer working on Vkd3d
I.e. graphics driver developer. Listen what he says, Bethesda, not many driver developers will point out where gavemdevs act stupid.
“Just upgrade your PC bro”
It’s running fine on my RTX 5090.
Honestly never knew there were people having performance issues. I haven’t really gone to any communities discussing the game til now and the game runs fine on my PC.
Bless my old pre-shortage 2070 S, medium on a 2K screen without any issues.
Maybe it’s because I’m only running at 1920x1080, but it runs fine for me on high settings.
TBH I was joking. I can’t personally vouch for any issues as I haven’t played.
I wonder if this has anything to do with not being able to load my saves. I went to mars and exited the game after a long gaming session. Came back the next day and I get a full system crash upon trying to load the exit save. Tried the autosaves, same deal. Tried my last normal save, same deal. Every once in about 5-6 full system crashes I can reload one of the saves from just landing on mars but if I try to enter caledonia then it’s a full system crash. It’s weird too, I can still here the game running in a loop but I can tell there is no input and the graphics fully fail. Very frustrating. I finally got back to my main rig to be able to play and the game has just been straight not playable since about the day after it came out. Can’t even get a hotfix from Bethesda. Bummer. I’ll just have to wait to play it again. I’m not going to restart a new character just to run into the same thing.
Well that’s a truly horrible experience… I think it warrants a refund
I had the same problem, this vkd3d update fixed it. But had to run it with lutris where i can select the vkd3d version manually.
I’m amazed that Bethesda has one of the premier game developers in their stead in id Software and didn’t bother to just use their shit. Instead they actively chased their staff away.
Bethesda the publisher and Bethesda the developer are different things.
The publishing arm seemed to know what they were doing, certainly enough for MS to buy them.
The developing arm is nothing if not consistent. You know what you’re getting into. An RPG, with lots of character build possibilities (even if a particular build overpowered enough for 90% of players to accidentally stumble across it, like Skyrim’s stealth archer build), a handful of memorable NPCs, no real character development, so-so performance, and a shitload of bugs.
If people are still buying them and still not enjoying them I don’t know what to say. It’s like watching Fast and Furious 10, and going “well that’s fucking dumb”.
I saw the ending of the last F&F by mistake (they sold us tickets for a movie that started an hour later), and let me tell you - that was fucking dumb.
I watched the first one many years ago, which appeared to just be Ocean’s 11, but for people who think putting blue lights under your car makes it go faster.
Then I watched F&F9 on Netflix the other month. I don’t remember any of the plot. At one point a car did a Tarzan rope swing.
Oh god, what? I haven’t seen any since the first either, was the movie fun enough to make it worth watching the series of them?
Given that I remember none of it, I’ll give it a resounding no.
Save yourself many hours of wondering what the fuck you’re doing with your life and just watch that one scene on YouTube.
ID and Bethesda Softworks and both using different custom, proprietary engines. Retraining your entire studio on a new engine is extremely time consuming, especially if it’s a custom engine with limited learning materials, like ID tech. There’s a big cost/benefit analysis there, and frankly, if Bethesda ever did switch engines, I think they’d be more likely to go with Unreal for this reason. Current staff, and certainly new hires, are much more likely to be familiar with it.
I wish they had gone with Ue5. The game would look better and perform better.
Like in Immortals of Aveum? I really don’t think that a switch to Unreal is a one-cure-for-all.
I didnt suggest it was
Well the Creation Engine and the ID Tech Engine follow two completely different main goals: One is build for wide open spaces and exploration with real time physics while also guaranteeing mod support. The other is build for fast paced combat in closed level structures. And I think especially the mod support is important to Bethesda and its community. That’s also the reason why so many people stick to Minecraft java instead of the more performant bedrock edition.
Do we know for sure that the Starfield devs weren’t able to figure out the problems with performance? I find often with companies, the larger they are, the more bureaucracy there is, and the more prioritization of tickets becomes this huge deal, where you even end up having meetings about how to prioritize tickets etc.
I would be surprised if the devs didn’t know what was wrong already, I think it’s more likely that management and higherups doesn’t care about them fixing it right now.
A lot of posts like these also seem to imply that the open source community should somehow be less competent than these companies and are surprised that the open source community can fix these issues. But the open source community has a ton of very respectable and extremely smart developers, it shouldn’t be any surprise really.
To be even more direct: there’s a huge overlap between the circles of “works in software dev” and “contributes to open source projects”.
I really try to do different things at home than work, but I’ve definitely contributed fixes to game mods (why do so many modders fail to do null checks before trying to interact with short lived shit like projectiles?) and open source software I’ve needed to do stuff.
Game devs have many teams all with different jobs, for a big game like this you’d typically have multiple teams dedicated to optimization in different areas (and between them). The specific problem in this case was how the game was communicating with graphics drivers (among others), which for any graphics heavy game is very fundamental to performance optimization. The problems aren’t even an after-the-fact optimization sort of thing that teams should have to identify and follow-up on, batching jobs is standard practice when interacting with GPUs whether or not there’s a translation layer.
When the devs of a core translation API between two supported graphics drivers that are commonplace in the gaming ecosystem have to write code to specifically fix issues with your application you’ve done something fundamentally wrong.
Link to arntzen’s technical description. https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/pull/1694
I’m so glad steam hired this guy cause if he was doing this sh*t to cover slack for Bethesda and the huge publishers all for just a personal side project I would lose any hope I had for humanity.
Typical Bugthesda. Am only wondering how did they get this big by only releasing buggy products. I can’t for the life of me remember a single product they have made that wasn’t buggy mess that community fixed for them time and time again without any compensation. Not only that community didn’t get any compensation, Bethesda tried to sell their work and pinch some more money.
Imo, despite the bugs and sometimes because of them, they’re really fun games.
Yet larian constantly gets free passes.
Any serious bitching about SF seems to me to be nitpicking from folks who were just looking to bitch at Bethesda. It’s a fantastic game with minor issues that are easily overlooked and don’t really affect the experience.
Because Larian is relatively small compared to Bethesda and the game exceeded the already high expectations, it’s a AAA D&D 5e game, which is something people were looking for for a long time. Larian deserves it, and they are actively fixing the game anyway. Bethesda has no excuses to be releasing games that have the types of bugs that they do after having such giant successes like Skyrim. They have the money.
Look I like the game so I’m not trying to say it’s bad in any way but you are just making excuses. Pent up demand doesn’t excuse the bugs. Fuck, they didn’t even need to develop the underlying systems, they already have 5e and the engines.
I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying that Larian deserves to get a free pass on this one for releasing a game that exceeded the already high expectations, not for the demand. And personally, I barely encoutered any bugs in a 90 hour long save…
As for them “already having 5e”, that’s true, but it’s a system that is rather complex and which only gets more complex with higher in-game levels and items which all slightly modify the game - which is easy on tabletop, but I can only imagine what a nightmare it must be to implement this in a computer game. And as far as I know, there aren’t any other computer games that truly implement 5e. Sure, there’s Solasta, but that’s highly modified.
As for the engine: I really don’t see it as a valid point, as they had to massively change and upgrade it between D:OS2 and BG3 anyway, it’s just too different.
I’m up to about 150 hours in BG3 and I don’t think I’ve seen a single bug.
I use a Mac and I’ve seen plenty, apart from us being forgotten and the release date pushed back silently twice. For me any dirt ground textures never render.
Larian does a much better job than any other studio, but I paid for the game to play in August at release with my friends, but then they silently dropped the release date and the only viable solution to playing was to pay for GeForce now and stream it.
I’d only be a little annoyed if they communicated their issues.
BG3 was basically unplayable for us for about 2 weeks post 1.0
But also, we really wanted to only play co-op, and the bugs were mostly online related, which is arguably more forgivable.
But still, hard crashing or freezing every 15 minutes for one of the three of us sucked, and looking at support forums, wasn’t uncommon either.
👌👍
I’m convinced large video game publishers make deals with graphics card manufacturers to force the end user to upgrade, the AMD and Nvidia deals are not for free access to new technology it’s for which ever bids the highest price to sell more cards. There is little progression in graphics fidelity since 2016. We used to take giant leaps and now we take small insignificant steps.
Fidelity is always going to have diminishing returns. Perhaps there’s something fishy going on in the video card business, I don’t know that, but as someone who works in CGI, the evolution we see year after year makes sense, it’s not like there’s a hidden untapped potential
I’m not sure if it’s such a direct conspiracy, but I’m sure some of this happens inadvertently at least. Developers of big budget games are likely going to target higher end hardware, and API usage that might cause problems on lower end hardware probably sneaks in as a result of that. I’m sure there’s some deals between game studios and Nvidia / AMD to get the latest GPUs for workstations at some discount, which probably means the machines they’re using for the bulk of development are beefier than the average consumer’s (you also probably want a bit of headroom while developing)… But this kind of stuff can naturally lead to higher requirements for software because you don’t run into performance issues unless you’re very serious about testing on lower end hardware… Which you might care about to some extent, but it’s an additional cost that can take away from other aspects of the game, which might make it less marketable (graphics are a big deal for marketing, for example).
Obviously it’s not great if a game uses API calls inefficiently and that means it runs worse than it would otherwise… But I’m not really that surprised when it happens? Working on big projects on deadlines there’s often a “try the obvious solution, worry later if it’s too slow” mentality, and I’m not sure you need any more of a conspiracy than that to account for stuff like this.
Looks like Hans implemented a workaround in vkd3d-proton 2.10, using the open-source AMD vulkan driver on linux (RADV).
Device generated commands for compute
With
NV_device_generated_commands_computewe can efficiently implement Starfield’s use of ExecuteIndirect which hammers multi-dispatch COMPUTE + root parameter changes. Previously, we would rely on a very slow workaround.NOTE: This feature is currently only enabled on RADV due to driver issues.
I don’t imagine it will take long for this to make its way into a Proton experimental release. Folks with AMD graphics who are comfortable with linux might want to give it a try.
I was able to install the DLSS mod which helped some but there’s still performance issue even with using the DF optimized settings. I assume this will be fixed with driver and game updates but who knows how long that will take.
Until people forget.
I’m inclined to believe this, and this likely isn’t even the whole extent of it. I’ve been playing on a Series X, but decided to check it out on my Rog Ally. On low, at 720p with FSR2 on, I’d get 25-30fps in somewhere like New Atlantis. I downloaded a tweaked .ini for the Ultra preset and now not only does the game look much better, but the city is up closer to 40fps, with most other areas being 45-60+. Makes me wonder what it was they thought was worth the massive cost that the default settings give, with no real visual improvement.
Another odd thing, if I’m playing Cyberpunk or something, this thing is in the 90%+ CPU and GPU utilization range, with the temps in the 90c+ range. Starfield? GPU is like 99%, CPU sits around 30%, and the temp is <=70c, which basically doesn’t happen playing any other “AAA” game. I could buy Todd’s comments if the frame rate was crap, but this thing was maxed out… but not getting close to full utilization on a handheld with an APU indicates something less simple.
I’m hoping the work from Hans finds its way to all platforms (in one way or another), because I’d love to use the Series X but 30fps with weird HDR on a 120hz OLED TV actually makes me a little nauseous after playing for a while, which isn’t something I commonly have a problem with.
From my experience on the Steam Deck is doesn’t matter if I run low graphics or medium graphics (some high settings) the performance is almost the same
If this is such a big issue then Bethesda should make it a top priority to fix it, it does sound like a complicated issue though.
Or let the community fix it for them
