Submitted 2 years ago by Mystify0771@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
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.
www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/…/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.
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.
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.
As far as wedding vows go, they’re not the MOST romantic… 🤷
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.
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
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.
Bethesda needs to start handing out checks to these people for fixing their fucking games dude
Maybe it’s their business model to have players fix the games for free?
And you know to some extent, having a community help you with your games and find bugs is beautiful and probably pretty fucking cool for devs. But the fact is that the business side of things continues to put a sour taste in all of our mouths, devs included.
I really hope AI and the like push game devs out of big businesses and into self employment. Of all the types of people, I want problem solvers to have that life the most.
They owe them quite a lot…
WHAT DID YOU SAY
Well, they do hire a ton of modders
But are they hiring the right modders?
Answer me this:
Is helping tho? 😂
People actually need to stop doing Bethesda’s work for them. Release after release they just push out buggy and unfinished product and community fixes it for them while they somehow take credit. FO76 was a huge mess exactly because people couldn’t fix it. Bethesda is bad, and people need to see it as such. Paying full price for their products is downright insulting.
I think if they would just price the games more fairly and in accordance with how the game actually plays then that’d be a different story.
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.
Plus you’ll get to see if they add all the post-launch microtransactions like games are starting to do these days.
Launch to good reviews, and THEN rebalance and force players towards transactions and paid currencies.
Yup… dodged Diablo 4 by doing this.
Kinda sad about it though, really enjoyed Diablo II back in the day. Really miss the days when the name Blizzard meant guaranteed quality.
Yea, it’s maddening.
Plus Plus you can get it on sale.
They’ll probably have Creation Club stuff, like in Skyrim and FO4, where they contract modders to create small pieces of content.
The issues are way overblown. I have a mid tier system as best (2070S 8700k) and with the DLSS mod and some performance tweaks I play on Ultra.
I love Starfield and has been playing it every day since launch. It runs like dogshit. Sure it doesn’t stutter or anything but I can’t, for the life of me, get the average FPS in outdoor areas to be anything higher than 70. 5800X + 3080 Ti. It doesn’t matter how much I lower the setting, the CPU overhead is crazy.
it seems the current meta is to hate on starfield at the moment. I would suggest to keep playing and enjoying the game and not to post about it.
I will wait regardless.
Try Armored Core 6, 100% worth it day one
Sadly not my kind of game, but thank you!
I can’t disbelieve the rocket skating and I feel lame
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.
Even before release I figured I’d wait for a sale. Too many good games just came out I want more, big backlog of Yakuza games I recently started and got totally hooked on. Not interested in helping standardize $70 games, will wait for a sale, and by then there will be a better mod scene too. Less money for a better game, win/win.
Ah, I see your a r/patientgamers fan 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.
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 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.
I’m having no issues on PC either.
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 and acted rpg content that people are immediately sinking hundreds of hours into
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.
If you decorate a dish containing raw chicken with immaculate edible gold leaf and serve it to people, you still served people raw chicken. It does not matter how extensive the lore, character design and world building is if the fucking game runs like shit and crashes.
only issue I see with the game at the moment is that they did not use those fly/land/dock sequences to mask the loading times. I think that would enhance the experience a lot
It really would have. Considering that my loading screens are scarcely longer than those sequences anyway it could have, should have been nearly seamless.
Exactly it almost seems like that was the plan and then something went wrong and they couldn’t fix it in time
Looks like Hans implemented a workaround in vkd3d-proton 2.10, using the open-source AMD vulkan driver on linux (RADV).
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.
“Just update your PC bro”
It’s running fine on my RTX 5090.
I preferred the Little Mermaid, the Ugly Duckling, and of course the Emperor’s New Groove, but his commentary on graphics in Starfield is also a compelling work.
Thank you, I too did a double take on the name.
For anyone wondering, the author is called “Hans Christian Andersen”.
Why hasn’t emperor’s new groove gotten a remake yet tho
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
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 if many hours.
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.
Are you playing on PC/Steam? Something weird happened to me yesterday where an exit save wouldn’t load. Upon trying an earlier save, I found none would load (game crashed to desktop when selecting). I could not figure it out.
On a whim I verified files in Steam, which triggered a 30 MB update. After verification, my exit save worked fine. I’m at a loss for why core files would change.
Nah, Bethesda will just do the same as they did with the Creation Engine. Let the community patch their crap and never fix it.
It’s shitty but at the same time, if people are gonna do it anyway… idk it’s tacky and the audacity to slap a $70+ price tag on the thing? Fuck that
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.
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.
Link to arntzen’s technical description. github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/…/1694
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 on from scratch instead of pushing their Frankenstein engine along.
I’d assume an issue possibly at the engine level isn’t something that a mod can fix?
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.
There’s a Bethesda parody from a few years ago: youtu.be/YPN0qhSyWy8
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.
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.
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.
I love the bitching and whining over minor shit while BG3 gets a free pass for a massively buggy game 🤣
I’ve not seen any performance issues or anything else I’d call for sure a bug in the few hours I’ve played…
dustyData@lemmy.world 2 years ago
No, Todd Howard doesn’t make mistakes, you just have to buy a more expensive graphics card!
/s
Ertebolle@kbin.social 2 years ago
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.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 2 years ago
The Todd Howardest.
He permits you to bathe in the light of his Todd Howardishness.
Hasuris@sopuli.xyz 2 years ago
Totally unrelated but did you know there’s a promotion deal for AMD’s latest and greatest RX7000 GPUs?
TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 2 years ago
Best Buy had Starfield free with a 6700XT the other day when I was pricing out a move from Nvidia.
traveler@lemdro.id 2 years ago
Quite the coincidence huh /s
pancakes@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
That’s false, the mistakes are touted as part of the experience.
Davel23@kbin.social 2 years ago
It just works.
Jaysyn@kbin.social 2 years ago
No matter how expensive your Intel Arc GPU was, Starfield won't run on it.
dojan@lemmy.world 2 years ago
The Intel Arcs are really cheap though.