Oh, it doesn't like it. Can you jump into the ship? Nope, I'm just stuck.
Um. Whoa! I call this guy Laser Dick.
You know why? I've never even seen that warning.
And crashed. It's been years since we first heard about Starfield
and in the lead up to the broad release, Gamer's excitement is palpable.
I mean, look at them.
Trust me, for socially awkward gamers, that's really, really excited. But will you even be able to run it?
Now, obviously Bethesda publishes minimum and recommended specs for the game.
So, yes you will, but what they don't tell you
is what kind of resolution and what kind of details you're gonna be running at.
So we built up three rigs. The minimum rig with a Radeon 5700,
the recommended rig with an RTX 2080 and, forgive measure, a top of the line machine
with an RTX 4090 and we are going to be playing
Starfield! Yeah.
And we're gonna tell you about our sponsor. We're gonna start with the recommended configuration.
This is how Bethesda wants the game to be played.
That is, unless you're on an Xbox, in which case you're gonna be at 4K 30 FPS on the Series X.
Personally, I think I'd rather turn the resolution down and go for higher frame rate,
but hey, we're gonna play around with that, all right? On that note, I'm setting up Capture right now
and what resolution are we targeting here? I'm capturing at 1080, but.
It doesn't really say the recommended specs, just give the hardware,
doesn't tell you the resolution target. Oh, okay. I'm gonna capture at 4K
and then we're just gonna kind of set it to whatever.
I can sit cross-legged, unlike you.
You laughing? You laughing, Mr. Flexible Boy? Let's see you touch your toes, smart guy.
I can't. Is this the screen people hate it so much?
This is. Oh. I actually don't mind it at all, except for that thing in the corner,
because you know that's just. Season test! Yeah.
They're just prepping you like, there's gonna be something here. I like these menus, though.
I think they look great. Yeah. Looks like pretty much all the stuff
that I would wanna change. Motion blur's on. Bleh! Bleh!
Okay, render resolution. Clearly what we're targeting then is about 1440p.
So let's set it to 100 and then set it to 1440p.
Wait, everything I'm doing is wrong.
What we should be doing is running at the recommended settings
on the recommended computer. But we don't know what they are. Oh.
It's whatever's in here. We've got a Ryzen 3,600X, 16 gigs of DDR4 memory.
Not top spec, but a pretty decent kit. A Gen 3 NVMe drive and an RTX 2080.
And I am gonna let the game tell me how to run it.
I think if this is the plan, we should evaluate what it sets as the default.
Yeah. I mean, there's some things in here that I super duper don't agree with.
I like that we're running at all high. So we're gonna get to see a lot of effects.
I don't like that.
Actually, I don't like anything about this. It's all on high.
So for things like crowd density, I can see why they want the world to feel populated.
It's gonna make it feel more real. That's probably good. It's supposed to be a game you immerse yourself into.
Yep. They've cranked up the graphics preset.
So we've got indirect lighting and high volumetric lighting
and that kind of cool stuff like that. But if I can't run at my native resolution,
you can see we're targeting about 1440p here
with 62% and then upscaling. Do I really want to be wasting cycles
on post-processing like film grain and motion blur?
Also, upscaling is just the default behavior
on top of rendering at a lower resolution scale.
So this might not look that great. Also, V-Sync on by default.
Have you played six hours of this game? Did you even sleep last night?
No, that's just six in the morning. That's six AM. I'm only like an hour and a half in.
Yeah, that's so much healthier getting up at six in the morning to play video games before work.
I might have played for around six hours though. Ha ha ha ha.
Maybe we'll have to try Luke's save and see if there's some interesting stuff later on.
I'm on Mars. Way to go, Elon. Yeah. Ha ha ha.
I beat him to it. This looks and feels like crap immediately.
Oh, the motion. Uh-oh. You guys see that?
There were some hitches and stutters in our screen capture that were not
representative of real-world gameplay. So while all the over-the-shoulder footage you guys see
will be from our gaming session, all the capture that you see will be
from a separate recording that was made in the studio at exactly the same in-game settings.
This looks and feels like crap immediately. Oh, the motion blur.
Is that motion blur that I'm seeing? Yeah, it's motion blur and it's also not running at a very high frame rate.
Yeah. Are we gonna get frame view or something? Frame view is on the computer.
We're gonna fire it up. First, I wanna experience it. Sure, yeah, fair enough. But I can tell you right now
we're running at about 35, maybe 40 FPS, yeah.
This feels like what I would expect from a console right now. We're managing to get a ton of tearing
in spite of the fact that V-Sync is on. I love that. You know what?
To their credit, I'm really not noticing the FSR-ness of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The render resolution hack is feeling pretty not too hatched together on this.
If you asked me what resolution this was running at, I would tell you 4K.
Do you think it helps being outside? No, because outside,
I can find distant, you know, skinny, slightly diagonal lines.
Yeah, the poles and stuff. Yeah, pieces of scaffolding and stuff like that.
And they've, I mean, look at this. They've done a pretty good job of smoothing it out.
This is also Creation Engine 2, and this is their first time as far as I know
experimenting with photogrammetry. So some of the objects that they are able to like
scan with photos are gonna look really good. Yeah.
I don't think they did it with everything or like sometimes it doesn't feel like they did.
This is clearly, I tried for about 10 minutes texture.
Yeah. But some of the stuff is really clean,
looks really cool. Like obviously they're gonna spend time on a gun box, right?
That looks really good. Because you're gonna be looking at it fairly closely
and fairly often, because you're gonna be looting these the whole game. Sometimes you can kind of feel
that part of the game was designed all like potentially years earlier
than other parts of the game. I don't know. That makes sense.
Sorry, I'm just... No, you're good. I'm just trying to poke holes in FSO2 right now.
I think you should go talk to the blue though.
We're not actually playing the game, Luke. You do know that, right? No, I know.
But you're still in the sky. I am busy looking at this. Yeah, but you're gonna see a spaceship coming in
which you might wanna see. Fine. It's probably up.
They come from the sky. Usually. You know you're a dick, right?
Ha ha ha ha. Okay, but how'd that feel overall?
I wanna adjust my settings. I wanna do it right now. Do that now?
Yeah, yeah. No, let's fire up frame view first and see if CYFPS is running out.
34. 34, 36. Man, I'm good.
That's a boat. Yeah, that's what we said. Okay, first thing that needs to go,
film grain, motion blur. Shadow quality, eh.
Eh. Eh.
Eh. Eh. Sure. We're basically going down to medium.
Let's lose the V-sync so it doesn't feel quite so laggy.
Would you up the render resolution scale now that you've dropped that stuff or just take the FPS increase?
No, I want the FPS. I'm running at 34 FPS.
I'm not even playing and it looks rough. So yeah, I agree with that. Massive kudos.
You don't have to restart the game or anything silly like that. You don't even have to click to save it.
It just works. Oh, wow.
It looks worse, I think. It does. What's the performance though?
It feels a little better. It's not much better. Honestly, not that much higher
but I gotta tell you, I don't really pick up the difference
in image quality that much. I think I noticed it in the shadows.
Those look like pretty solidly okay shadows to me.
I'm not sure if this applied.
Turn the shadows up, just the shadows. Sure.
Oh, okay. Yeah, they're softer. Yeah, yeah. Without actually being the one playing it,
it feels a lot better now but I think there's just motion blur being off. That's just motion blur and V-sync being off.
It's still running at like 30. 30 FPS, essentially.
So this is recommended? Yeah. Not minimum.
Woof. The Series X can do 4K 30.
Todd Howard is a big advocate of high fidelity. How about the Series X is upscaling.
This is 4K 30 by that definition.
Can you not? Oh, it's actually his whole job to do that.
Yeah, he's a pirate. I call this guy laser dick. You know why?
They're literally highlighting the enemies with glue markers right now.
I thought my friends were blue.
They're gonna die again. Pluse account is gonna skew stats on this mission.
Man, this one player reloaded this safe like so many times and kept dying.
I want more frames per second. This is pretty rough. I would be a little disappointed.
I would be a little disappointed. If I have a 4K display, which is not even that outlandish these days
for someone who's expecting to play this game, for someone with an RTX 2080,
I don't think it matters. Fair enough.
Once you are running at 4K resolution, you are straight up.
You're in the 30s. Going to be running at 30 something FPS with this card.
Considering this is their recommended, not their minimum, that's a little concerning for me.
And it looks me honished. Still good.
It's fine. But noticeably worse. It's not great, but it's fine.
Wait, why is dynamic resolution on it? Oh, wow.
Oh, wait. Whoa. Right, because that was the default.
Okay, so hold on. Hold on, maybe now. No, because all I was playing around
with was detail levels. Yep, we are still at 30 something FPS.
I think it's time for us to drop the res. I don't even think I'm going to try 1440p.
Really? We weren't even at ultra before. That was high.
It just toggles dynamic resolution every time you change the preset.
Okay. All right, v-sync off. That kind of makes sense.
Motion blur off. Depth of field off.
Okay. 1080p. Right.
Really? No. You get borderless full screen
or you play in a window. Okay, so one of the earliest mods
that's going to come out is true full screen mod. Remember when I said I was happy with this menu?
Yeah. Luke, I think what we're about to find out
is that this game runs like crap. Oh, is that 24?
You're, you're sub 30 now.
Holy. Do you know what just happened, you guys?
I went to 1080p rendering,
but I turned off FSR. I turned off AMD's sharpening upscaling.
So before when we were getting 30 frames per second at 4K,
that may not have even been rendering at 1080p.
This game runs like crap on the recommended hardware.
Everything low, all the things.
But no upscaling. No, you don't get to do that.
Ooh, that literally didn't help.
It did a little. Did it? Yeah, just a little, not much. It's hard to read the number in the corner.
Okay, but should anyone really turn FSR off?
Okay, fine, fine. 30 FPS, sir.
I feel like it's messin' around with stuff in the background. This looks worse in my opinion.
This looks, oh, yeah, this looks way worse. Well, I think I've experienced enough of this.
Yeah. You ready for minimum? Yeah. He's upset.
I am. I'm pretty upset right now, yeah.
If I hadn't played the game at all yet, I would probably be doom and glooming right now.
But I played it on a 7900XTX last night. So I know what it can feel like when it's good.
Played it on a $1,000 graphics card. Yeah.
AMD and NVIDIA, I gotta be sitting there. Yes!
Well, not NVIDIA, they don't care. NVIDIA doesn't care about it. AMD will be.
You know what I'm noticing, looking at this test bench? We've only gone down one generation for CPU to a 2600X.
Our RAM's a little slower, just because it doesn't support as fast RAM.
SATA SSD, which I'm not expecting to matter, but our GPU.
RX 5700. That's not slow.
No. And that's bare minimum.
Oh. Is this what we had it on?
Go to defaults. Go to defaults. Yeah, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Wait.
No, yeah, this is false. Oh! This is a new computer, Luke.
Okay. Okay. Hey, we get to have to feed. Yeah.
Do we have motion blur? No, motion blur's off. But dynamic resolution is on.
Render scales at 50 or is it? 50. Yeah.
1080p, all low.
You don't notice it when you're moving in a straight line. Yeah, the turning.
That is really interesting, but the turning.
Yeah, the turning's not awesome. So. Less object loading.
That's right. And easy to handle dynamic scaling
as you get in closer and farther from objects. But obviously.
Immediately upon turning. Yeah.
That's very interesting. I know that when I was playing at home,
just turning v-sync off instantly made that feel a lot better.
I don't know what it was, but it just, it felt like garbage. I mean, it always does,
but turning specifically felt like garbage with v-sync on.
Okay. That's better. It's still, it's tearing and there's other problems,
but it's better. It feels smoother though. Yeah. That's a lot of tearing,
which is something that you're inherently going to get
without any kind of vertical sink, but some engines are more susceptible to it than others.
For example, if you were to play one of the Tomb Raider games,
I don't know what magic they put in that engine,
but it doesn't really tear to the same extent that we're seeing right now.
It's so much that it almost looks like a Jell-O effect,
like you saw on some of the older iPads. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You could see that, hey? How it skews the shape of that doorway.
However, okay, let's give credit where it's due.
It's still a pretty okay looking game at all low.
Yeah. Honestly, less noticeable out here,
because I'm kind of looking off into the distance. Yeah.
Still looks pretty good. Yeah, you know what? It's mostly the level of detail at a distance that gets me.
Like everything up close, still looks pretty good.
My character looks pretty darn good. My ARM out in front of me looks pretty good.
You can tell they are definitely picking their battles
with respect to what's being rendered at a higher resolution. Yeah.
Bow, bow, bow. I've never even seen that warning in the game.
And crashed. I wouldn't normally go, oh, a new game crashed.
Uh, uh. But it seems it's because of- We specifically built this.
Yeah. To their recommended specifications.
But your 7900 XT has been rock solid.
Flawless. Other than heating my legs a little bit too much,
it's been great. Overall, definitely looks like you smeared Vaseline
all over the screen. Like look at the textures on these boxes here.
Yeah. I can barely even tell that there's definition
to this from a distance, right? I have to get up to here.
It is getting better. To see that this is like, got depth to it, you know?
This whole, you'll have 30 to 40 FPS and you'll like it experience
is not selling me on this game right now. Yeah. I mean, this is fine.
I just wish that they were giving me all the different dials that they're adjusting.
And what I would expect is that mods are gonna come out
that are gonna allow you to much more finely tuned the level of detail.
You can tell that the Fezda is targeting their 1% lows
as opposed to just averages, which is kind of cool. Seems kind of smart.
Because our averages are like 45, 50,
which contributes to an overall smoother feel. But our 1% lows are around 25, 26,
which is exactly where we were at the recommended spec as well.
It's just that the averages were much closer there.
I couldn't even speculate sort of, you know, why it was a more even experience last time.
Look at that, that shimmering object right there. What is that?
The crosshairs, oh. That whole little pad there.
That shouldn't be happening. It's just a platform. Not having the option to take the recommended config
and just turn it down to something that'll get me 60 FPS
is extremely frustrating to me. Let's go back to recommended for a minute here.
Cause it feels like we've got to be missing something
if we're running at 40 plus FPS on the minimum spec
at the same settings and 30 FPS at the recommended spec.
Yep, no, this looks like poo. I imagined it. Even how much more powerful the 2080 is,
this is not really a better enough experience.
First of all, does this look, does that look better? It looks more like heat distortion or something.
Yeah, it looks marginally better, I think. Honestly, it looks a little better to me.
The 5700 is meant to contend with a 2060 Super.
Yeah, and this is a 2080 non-super.
Correct. So it's a full tier and change better.
But that's not even the point for me. This is just static, we're not moving.
What I wanna know is if there's sliders I don't have access to
and the level of detail at a distance looks better to me.
I think they're messing around with draw distance with some dynamic setting that I don't have access to.
Interesting, yeah. That's my theory right now. Can we look at the ship?
I don't think I'm imagining it. That looks pretty similar to me.
But I think it's better. Same thing with these solar panels
or whatever they are on that structure behind it. Okay, let's open up frame view
and see because this is so much of a more powerful card
that the only way that this could be running at a similar FPS at the same settings
would be if it's doing that, it's not.
You know how I pointed out earlier that we like loaded into the level
and it was like running at a high FPS and then it like went down, yeah. So we're, I think this is a little higher
than we had last time. It's performing better than before. It's about 45 FPS average now.
I think we've got this figured out now. Dynamic resolution is a bit of a misleading name
for what's going on here. And actually, even the description of it
doesn't give you much help. When enabled, this allows the game resolution
to be reduced dynamically in high intensity scenes
in order to maintain frame rate. Okay, fair enough. But in PC gaming, we think of resolution
not by its dictionary definition, but we think of it in terms of pixel count.
That's not what they're doing. And in fact, they're doing more than one thing
as far as we can tell. They are dynamically changing the quality
at which things are rendered at distance.
So I would consider that something more along the lines of a view distance slider.
And it appears that that's our only slider
that adjusts texture quality. I think so.
That's why the entire game just looks better on this card,
even though we're not running at a markedly higher frame rate. Because you're turning on your hidden sliders basically.
And who knows what else? It's doing those two things for all I know.
It could be adjusting the actual entire resolution
that it is scaling the image at, PC resolution, pixel count,
and then upscaling more or less as well.
It says specifically that it will reduce. It never actually says it will increase
in how it's written. But we are also upscaling.
So we would be relying more on our upscaling.
You know what? Shut up, Alt F4 working.
Yeah. Okay, games that lock out Alt F4 can die in a fire.
Fun fact, we just heard from Riley from the TechLink team that apparently
ARC, Intel ARC, is just not launching the game at all.
They're targeting broad release as opposed to early release rough.
Notice something? Yeah. On a 1080p monitor,
their recommended settings are very different.
Why do they assume, based on my desktop resolution settings,
how I might like to play the game? Cause I was kind of wondering about that.
50% scaling of 4K is not 1080p.
But why are we targeting 720p resolution scale
with upscaling at high now? Like what experience is this gonna be?
Maybe we should see, yeah. The fact that their recommendation is so different,
just based on what like stupid pixel count my monitor is,
is pretty bothersome to me. I hate that the resolution scaling is just a slider
because I can't tell exactly what's going on. Performance is basically the same.
Ah, you're, you're pretty high, I don't know. Oh, it doesn't like it.
Oh, can you jump into the ship? Can you jump? Nope, I'm just stuck.
What if you run into the ship after they get off of it? Cause the ship takes off.
Oh, more! I would pick not having to change my desktop resolution
in order to get access to a lower render scale.
Yeah, that's garbage. I honestly, I hate that.
They should just let me pick a pixel count and then upscale to whatever the resolution is.
I really, really do not like not having access
to your resolution. I want to try one last thing
before we finally play on the high end system. I want to play at those low, at our low preset now.
At this. Yeah. Well, cause you would do a lot. Render resolution scale is just according to graphics
preset, are you kidding me?
Ultra is still 75%. No, but that's the thing.
Render resolution scale should be completely independent
of your graphics, like visual fidelity. I do agree that, I wouldn't normally agree,
but because they put it above graphics preset,
you would think it wouldn't be changed. No, it's not just that, like logically speaking,
that's why so many games put the resolution and the rendering scale in a completely different
subheading in the menu. That's why they do it, because it's like,
basically a different thing. It's not a level of detail setting. Sorry, I'm getting kind of upset right now,
because you set a resolution and then you set a detail level.
When I set a higher detail level, I am often doing so knowing that that is going to cost me
a trade-off in the resolution that I can run at at a given FPS.
One thing too is there's an arrow after ultra, even though nothing else can go up,
is that just dynamic resolution scale? Did nothing change?
Ultra at a custom, but there's no, nothing changes.
That's so random. 59, 60!
Okay, I'm finally running, but I am running at
literally 540p upscaled.
Oh my. You know how I said earlier,
that 50% of 4K is not 1080p?
I think it might be. I think 50%-
I'm pretty sure it might be one quarter
the actual pixel count, right? Because 50% of the resolution by pixel count
would actually be like at like 60 something percent
on the slide. You get what I mean, right? Cause you're cutting out like this.
No, I think this is actually 540p.
So now we're just actually running at 1080p.
This is like when we were at 4K at 50% resolution scaling.
If this was my hardware, this is probably what I would do, personally. And the only way to access this is by manually changing
your desktop resolution, which is garbage,
because I really don't want to have to change that every single time I load the game up.
All the body language analysts out there,
and we know there's a lot of them on the internet are watching us right now.
Both crossed. Not even playing the game, just like, don't like it.
Yeah, yeah. That is, this is 100% what I would do,
but it needing manual, like what? It literally has the arrows.
But you can't change it cause I'm in borderless full screen, like.
Oh. Oh, wait. I think I know what's going to happen.
Ah! I have something way more important to talk about.
Actual settings? It's the fact that on a 4090,
our render resolution scale is 75%.
Now that I understand better how that scale is working on this particular title, kind of 1440p.
Interesting, they know that that's the resolution that people should use. Crazy.
And FSR is on. Yeah.
I'm not even able to run it that natively. Now, I'm very interested to see
what kind of FPS they've chosen for me.
Okay. It's definitely running at higher than 60 FPS now.
The flames from the ship look a little better.
Smoke looks pretty similar. It's an interesting point. We were talking about this while the camera was off,
but Ploof brought up that in modern games, there's so many tricks that they can use
that honestly, the difference between low and ultra these days is just not the same as it used to be.
It's still not the night and day difference that it used to be back in the day. I think that's completely legit,
but it does look a lot better. It looks a lot better. Like, look how clean the ship looks from here.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Ah, man, so it's view distance, man.
View distance is a big one. This is one of the few games in a long time
that makes me want a really sick GPU though. I wish they just gave me my texture settings
and just gave me my level of detail and view distance settings.
Can we turn off motion blur now? Okay, mom.
Motion blur, please. I'm turning it off. Please. Luke, I hate it as much as you do,
but it's not what we're doing today. Honestly, it looks better with it.
My strong tear. It feels like there's tearing though.
His mind wasn't open to this experience. What do you think? What do you think? I don't like motion blur.
I don't like motion blur either. You guys have both known me for years.
I know, my setup is correct. But it looks bad. My setup is correct.
Honestly, I would still keep v-sync off, but what I would do is I would just not play at 4K.
Shout out 1440p or 1600p, realistically,
as just always being the correct answer. Remember that video we did years ago, Ploof?
4K gaming's a rip-off where we basically are like, yep, 1440p is the sweet spot,
if you like smoothness and good image quality. Yeah, this is good.
It looks great as long as you're only trying to run it
at a reasonable resolution. It should be noted that FSR is on,
so we are not necessarily actually rendering at 1440p,
but I would not identify this. Honestly, I wouldn't even realize at a reasonable distance
that this isn't 4K. 1440p really is a nice middle ground,
but to get this experience, boy are we ever spending a ton of money.
So we're running a Ryzen 7th Gen X3D processor,
basically as fast as it gets for gaming. We've got 32 gigs of DDR5 memory and an RTX 4090.
In summary, either the minimum or recommended spec
is great as long as you wanna run at 30 FPS. If you happen to have a 1080p monitor
or you manually set your desktop resolution to 1080,
it enables a little bit more granularity to play around with what your render resolution is,
and then you can kind of upscale from there to the point where you're happy. You might be able to get 60-ish, 60-class FPS,
so you know, like high 40s to mid 50s.
It'll feel okay. And if you wanna have the best experience on a PC,
you are gonna be spending a fricking lot of money.
That high performance spec is very expensive. Expensive, like this segue to our sponsor.
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There were some findings, there were some shenanigans.
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