Starfield will be 30 fps on Xbox Series X and S.

[curl-6]

sc94597 said:

curl-6 said:

I'm aware, but that doesn't change the fact that running at 60 gives you half as much frame time to work with. There may be technicalities with the update rate of different tasks and systems or how your load is spread across cores/threads/components, but ultimately 33.3ms is double 16.7ms.

And world scale doesn't tell you much, it's what's in it that will determine how demanding it is. You can make a single room unable to hit 60 if you fill it with enough processing tasks. 

As Digital Foundry points out, 30fps vs 60fps is a design choice. Developers have a vision, and limited amount of power to try to achieve it. There are some things current hardware simply can't do at 60.

Sure it gives you half as much time, my point is that it doesn't necessarily mean double the available processing power. 

Here is how item locations are implemented in Skyrim. Do you think Starfield will work fundamentally differently? I doubt it and nothing shown so far tells us otherwise. I suppose the location space itself is fungible because of the procedural generation, that might be a difference that affects calculations once (as the world is procedurally generated.)  

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim_Mod:Save_File_Format

globalDataTable1	Global Data[fileLocationTable.globalDataTable1Count]	Types 0 to 8.
globalDataTable2	Global Data[fileLocationTable.globalDataTable2Count]	Types 100 to 114.
changeForms	Change Form[fileLocationTable.changeFormCount]
globalDataTable3	Global Data[fileLocationTable.globalDataTable3Count]	Types 1000 to 1005.

You might also have longer object permanence (in Skyrim if the tile wasn't touched in 30 in-game days, then the object is removed from the table.) Or you might have more variety of items remain permanent. 

But that will mostly affect the save file size. Nothing that has been shown so far hints, for example, that if you are located on planet X there are some physics going on - on planet Y's objects while you are gone and the objects' locations might change due to that. "Permanence" in Elder Scrolls/Fallout/etc. is mostly permanence of the object's location and form, which are stored in a table and pulled when you load a save file. 

This is contrastingly different from say a game like Tears of the Kingdom where there are interactions going on when you leave an object (which is why there is a 20 object and maximum distance limit, overall producing very little permanence in that game.) 

But it does give you more time; no matter how much power you have, 30fps gives you more time.

And that's only one of countless jobs the CPU has to handle. For the kind of big and complex games Bethesda makes, they may not want to compromise their design goals just for the sake of 60fps.

On fixed hardware, you simply can't do as much at 60 as you can at 30.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 17 June 2023