- cross-posted to:
- starfield@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- starfield@lemmy.zip
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.
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No, Todd Howard doesn’t make mistakes, you just have to buy a more expensive graphics card!
/s
Todd Howard doesn’t do what Todd Howard does for Todd Howard. Todd Howard does what Todd Howard does because Todd Howard is… Todd Howard.
The Todd Howardest.
He permits you to bathe in the light of his Todd Howardishness.
It’s actually just pee, but not just any pee, Todd fucking Howard’s pee
Totally unrelated but did you know there’s a promotion deal for AMD’s latest and greatest RX7000 GPUs?
Best Buy had Starfield free with a 6700XT the other day when I was pricing out a move from Nvidia.
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That’s false, the mistakes are part of the experience.
It just works.
No matter how expensive your Intel Arc GPU was, Starfield won’t run on it.
The Intel Arcs are really cheap though.
People figured out the performance issues with Starfield when it was first announced: the Bethesda logo
Creation Engine 2.0.
AKA Creation Engine 1.0 with more patches than a 1sqmi quilt.
Evolution isn’t wrong. It’s not like Unreal Engine gets rewritten from scratch for each major version.
That’s not really a good metaphor for software.
Or maybe it is if you meant how many weird and inefficient things living creatures have because it was good enough. Think about that the next time you accidentally choke on nothing
Exactly, people forget that most of the well known engines today are as old or older than Creation Engine, they’re all patched/upgraded as it fits, though Creation Engine has no apparent version numbers and it’s made by Bethesda so you get free internet points and a feeling of superiority for hating on the popular thing.
If you took these folks opinions as truth you’d think Bethesda games are massive flops that barely sell 10 copies and are a study case on how not to develop a game, but the real world is very different from the echo chamber…
Or the Source 2 engine, which is just a patched version of the Quake 1 engine.
Except unreal engine literally was rewritten from 3 to 4.
Which is, literally, not every major version. I didn’t say “all Unreal Engine versions are evolutionary steps over their predecessors”, I said “they don’t get rewritten from scratch for each major version”.
Someone else also brought up the Quake engine, which has even more evolutionary steps; even with forks like the Source engine.
Evolution frequently discards baggage.
Bethesda just keep piling shit on top without doing any of the necessary groundwork to make it run well.
You can only reinvent the Bounding Box once. Epic is a better steward of technical debt. Bethesda doesn’t know what that is.
But with the optimization quality of current UE 5 games I’m quite pessimistic about the current trend of game development.
aka Gamebryo
As audial, it takes free labor for Bethesda to get their shit working the way it’s supposed to. What a garbage developer.
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Well written? Bethesda?
I mean sure their games are fun, but they’re not particularly good by any measure.
Hey now. Morrowind was beautifully written.
Then by Oblivion they cheapened out and used AI to start generating the map and dungeons.Oblivion being developed with AI driven layouts is a hilarious supposition. It was 2002 dawg.
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No it doesn’t.
Morrowind’s entire map was hand made. All of its quests were hand made.
Starting with Oblivion, they moved to make most of the map and quests automatically with minimal human intervention.
To the point that they admitted it was too much for the tech at the time and actually hurt the gameplay, and pulled back for Skyrim, using a mix of computer made and human made content, adding in the radiant quest system in an attempt.to make the gameplay “endless”.
The modern thing we call AI is just the chatbots from a decade prior with improved processing power and vastly larger data sets to work with. The tech in those chatbots had been working in various pieces for a decade before that.
There’s a lot of interesting world building and history to draw upon, it’s just a shame Bethesda doesn’t do that.
You’re never really presented with moral choices. The story never really has you think about things. There’s a tonne of lore books and tapes and what have yous that spill a rich tapestry of stories at you, but you’re never really shown any of it. I’ve had fun with Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim, and to a lesser extent Fallout 4, but at this point I’m kind of tired of it. They’re all the same game. They have the same floaty combat. The same lacklustre storytelling. The same awkward “talk at you” conversations.
Been there, done that.
Yeah when people tell me that Fallout or Skyrim are “well written” I know that they don’t read.
what does this even mean? “sure they’re fun” and also “not particularly good by any measure” are conflicting statements
E.G. Fallout 4 is fantastic exploration.
It’s best gameplay is when your ignore the plot entirely and create your own story.
Same with Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Oblivion.
The actual main plots are simplistic, boring and oddly quick. Weirdly, each of the games has an expansion that has a well done quest line, so its not that they can’t do it, they choose to not do it.
Fast food can be delicious and filling, but it’s not good food.
Bethesda makes the game equivalent to fast food. Specifically instant ramen. You can tweak instant ramen, add veggies, eggs, meat, seasonings, etc. and transform it into something new. It’s still instant ramen, but it’s different.
Biodome with Pauly Shore is one of my favorite movies. I have fun every time i watch it. It’s not a “good” movie.
I would like to add Hook to this list. I was flabbergasted when, as an adult, found out it was poorly received. Then I rewatched it as an adult and was forced to agree. Still one of my favorites.
Better than Larian and Fromsoft by a country mile
So many PS5 owners in the comments today
I’m gonna go back to enjoying Starfield
Bye, go collect your trinkets
Thanks for admitting you’re just a butt hurt hater
I’m not sure what this means. Is the game not on PS5?
You’re absolutely free to enjoy the game. Like I mentioned in the comments, Bethesda’s game is like instant ramen. It can definitely be delicious and enjoyable, but it’s not good/healthy food.
Lmao, bruh you haven’t played the game … slow it down on the haterade, it’s not good for ya
It does not matter how extensive the lore, character design and world building is if the fucking game runs like shit and crashes. The game being in a playable state is the bare minimum.
Its like a chef spending hours decorating a dish made with spoiled raw chicken.
The fact that it literally can’t run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?
And don’t even get me started on how I keep feeling like I’m playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I’ve heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield…
This is what happens when a new console generation comes around. Just because you are on PC does not mean you are exempt from industry norms which are largely pushed by consoles. Your 970 was significantly stronger than the xbox one and the ps4, so you could use it for that entire generation if you wanted. Your 2060 is weaker than the xbox series x and the ps5, so should be no surprise that you use lower settings than those consoles.
Same with ssds. They werent required for so long because the consoles didnt have them. Now they do, and fast ones at that. So devs use them, and sometimes require them.
Now obviously starfield in particular is not a shining beacon of next gen technology and optimization. But those reasons you chose to pick on are not really examples of its failings.
It’s worth noting that though those are the “recommended” settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I’ve played, including other AAA releases from this year. It’s my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA’s recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I’ve ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.
I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it’s all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.
Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.
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.
Wow, so informed you are, you are talking of Starfield right?
You wouldn’t happen to just be talking out of your ass trying to make broad generalizations about games made 20 years apart to try and cast shade on a game you’ve never played would you?
This comment doesn’t actually say anything. It’s just casting aspirations against me because you didn’t like what I said. It doesn’t rebut anything or offer differing opinions on anything I proposed.
I’m not sure I’d give them well acted. The characters feel like puppets when they are talking. Maybe I’m just spoiled by BG3…
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 hear 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
Normally, I’d fully recommend that but I still want to play the game. I was actually really enjoying myself. I’ll just wait until they actually issue a patch. I’m a little shocked not even one hotfix has gone out.
I’m a little shocked not even one hotfix has gone out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole team took a vacation right when the game went into early access. But yes, it is very odd that not one patch has come out yet. I’m sure if everyone did take a vacation, they are probably mostly back now and working on it.
Yeah I bet everyone needed a break after they finally launched. Hopefully the r&r helps them come back fresh to knock some of these issues out.
The crash on loading has bricked two of my characters now. I don’t think I can be bothered again till they patch. One bricked in mars, the second bricked before I made it there. Waste io many hours.
That’s where I’m at. I’m excited to be able to play again but I have to wait for however long it takes them to release a patch addressing this. I’m not mad about anything I’ve seen. But I literally can’t play a game that I can’t trust to save and be reloaded.
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I’d assume an issue possibly at the engine level isn’t something that a mod can fix?
The end of the article seems to say as much. However, it seems the Vkd3d developers are trying to improve what they can.
if it run better on linux because of that i’m gonna laugh so much
That did happen with Elden Ring. Valve found an issue with it and patched it for Vulkan, so it ran better on Steam Deck than Windows.
I had a single crash playing starfield on PopOS. Other than that, it’s been incredibly performant for me. Ryzen 5700x and 6700xt GPU
I’ve got nearly the same specs (5800x and 6700XT), and mine crashes fairly often.
I’ve had not a single crash so far and most of my frame dipping issues (from 60 to 40) were solved by lowering the shadows to medium. The only bugs I had were ships spawning in other ships so they spaz out, but that’s very rare. On the other hand, Baldurs Gate 3 would constantly drop to 10 FPS and I had severe bugs that locked me out of entire questlines.
But I guess I’m not allowed to enjoy games and have fun because gamebryo = bad
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.
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.
There’s a Bethesda parody from a few years ago: https://youtu.be/YPN0qhSyWy8
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.
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
It’s the same trash engine they’ve used for 20 years. To be perfectly honest, they should put it in the ground and build a new one from scratch instead of pushing their Frankenstein engine along.
But how is it getting worse? Or did you always had to load every door you open. I honestly can’t remember
Yeah you always have. They’ve been screwing modern graphics features to the old dog for years and hoping it’ll continue to work. There’s some serious limitations in it that another engine would be able to work through for a game like this. Seamless planet travel for one, and less abrupt loading.
People really have no idea about anything in game development. I agree it should have seemless planet travel, but it is not something that an engine “can just do.” It takes so many complicated systems to make that function. There’s no engine that does it out of the box.
Basically any engine can do it, but it requires it to be built. The land must be deterministic at all points, it must be able to create chunks accurately for all points (which gets really weird at the poles, but any latitude above 0 because your chunks shouldn’t be square anymore), and they must be able to be streamed in to their correct position seemlessly.
It is quite complicated, and there’s no reason the engine developed for an arena shooter (Unreal) would be able to handle it any better than any other engine. It just has to be built.
There’s a reason Hello Games wrote their own engine for NMS. We all know that it was pretty bad gameplay-wise at launch, but under the hood NMS was (and still is) something of a technical marvel. No loading screens except for a disguised one when jumping between systems is quite impressive.
I’m eagerly awaiting the radio silence from all the people blaming it on obsolete hardware lol
Overall I like the game though, it has a lot of very entertaining ideas.
You’re just taking the claim of some random guy and a website at face value though.
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.
They should but its Bethesda. A company that misread the room thinking people making memes about how unoptimized their games are meant fans thought it was endearing rather than something deserving of mockery.
Or let the community fix it for them
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.
“You want to spend more time optimizing? Nah man, they should just buy a better pc” Todd Howard
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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.
