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curl-6 on 17 June 2023
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sc94597 said:
curl-6 said:

It's possible, but I wouldn't jump straight to blaming the team (or the engine, since frankly we know little about its current makeup) when it's entirely likely we're simply seeing the limits of what now 2 and a half year old hardware can do at 60fps. Xbox Series isn't cutting edge any more, there was always going to come a time when the games started to move passed what it could comfortably breeze through.

We'll of course know upon release of the PC version. I suspect that a Ryzen 3700x (non-overclocked) + RX 5700xt will be able to reach a 60fps target at 1080p (internal resolution) with medium settings, either before or after mods release to improve performance. That's hardware that is about (slightly worse than) the Xbox Series X's. 

1.If it can do it without a CPU bottleneck, then the game is probably GPU bound and 60fps was definitely doable with enough effort and likely very little loss in perceived visuals. (Note: The internal resolution of Starfield on Series X is 1296p, only about 1.44 times the pixel-count of 1080p.)

2. If it can't do it, but very little of the CPU is utilized (note: many console -> PC ports scale very well with core count these days), then yes we can blame the development team and/or Bethesda leadership's insistence on sticking to their decades old proprietary engine. 

3. If it can't do it and the CPU is well-utilized, then it is genuinely an optimized, CPU-bound game. 

Hopefully if it is #2, Bethesda gets the right criticism before they go full-production on ESVI, and Microsoft gives them more resources to fundamentally revamp their engine expediently so that ESVI doesn't get delayed. Microsoft has the resources to enable Bethesda to increase head-count significantly. 

We already know from the devs that the game can hit 60fps on Xbox some of the time, and that the reason it is capped at 30 is for consistency. 

So the performance that will tell us whether 60fps was viable possible will be how well it holds up in the most demanding areas and moments. If it's 60 most of the time, but flucuates in cities or heavy combat, then a 30fps cap makes sense.