Starfield’s requirements made it clear that we will need a very powerful PC to be able to move the game, and that this will become one of the most demanding games of the moment. With this in mind, and looking at the recommended hardware of the PC version, we had doubts about how the version for Xbox Series X and Series S could work, and thanks to a first technical analysis by Digital Foundry we have been able to clear up any doubts.
The console version of Starfield will run at a rate of 30 frames per second. The argument has been the same as always, that this is a decision that has been well thought out and that it is due to a “creative” issue. This is nothing more than the same old excuse for not recognizing that, in the end, Starfield is so demanding that they have had no choice but to lock the FPS rate to 30 because Xbox Series X was not able to move it to 60 FPS if the graphic quality was not reduced much.
I know what you’re thinking, which is understandable because the game runs in 4K resolution and this makes it very demanding. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that it is not like that, the game does not work in real 4K, Xbox Series X renders it in 1296p and then rescales to 4K. That base rendering resolution is very low, since we’re talking about 2,304 x 1,296 pixels, a figure that falls short of 1440p.
With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why Bethesda didn’t include a 60 FPS performance mode, because in the end it didn’t have the leeway to do so. I could have lowered the resolution to 1080p and rescaled from there to a higher resolutionr, but the loss in graphical quality would have been considerable and in the end that performance gain might have been insufficient to reach a fully stable 60 FPS.
This makes sense because, according to Digital Foundry itself, it seems that Starfield is a game that has a significant CPU dependencywhich would be totally normal considering the large number of NPCs that will be present in different locations, and also the object persistence system.
In summary, we can conclude by saying that Starfield is one of the most advanced games of this generation, which obviously would have been impossible on Xbox One, and that Bethesda’s decision to lock it at 30 FPS does not obey an optimization issue, but it has been something totally necessary due to how demanding the game is in general. Its launch is scheduled for September 6, and I hope I can offer you an analysis of it.
