Photo: Starfield on RTX 4090
One of the most eagerly awaited releases of the entire new generation of consoles, Starfield is now available to all players who have purchased Bethesda's space RPG in early access, and arrives for the general public on Wednesday, September 6. Released exclusively for Xbox Series X, Series S and PC, the game runs at 30 FPS on Microsoft's consoles, but those who want a 4K, 60 FPS experience on computers may be sorely disappointed.
Heavy even for an RTX 4090
In benchmark tests carried out by YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed, no video card in the world, not even NVIDIA's RTX 4090 with 24 GB of VRAM, was able to reach the famous 4K and 60 FPS stably. To give you an idea, the average frame rate per second with the 4090, the most powerful video card on the market and costing around US$ 2,000, was 55 FPS and peaked at 61 FPS.
In the case of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 24 GB of VRAM, AMD's top-of-the-line video card, Starfield ran at 4K with an average of 53 FPS and a peak of 59 frames per second. The Radeon RX 7900 XT with 20 GB of VRAM had an average of 44 FPS and a peak of 50 frames per second.
An RTX 4080 with 16 GB of VRAM, another high-end video card from NVIDIA, averaged 42 FPS and peaked at 47 frames per second, while AMD's direct competitor, the Radeon RX 6950 XT with 16 GB of VRAM, averaged just 36 FPS and peaked at 40 frames per second.
Photo: performance graphic
The trend is for Bethesda to work on Starfield update patches to improve the game's performance and optimization on PC, since the 60 FPS rate at 4K resolution isn't the only challenge to overcome. An RTX 3080 Ti with 12 GB of VRAM, for example, has an average rate of only 29 FPS, while the RTX 3090 with 24 GB of BRAM has an average of 31 FPS, which proves that the special RPG has problems with the relationship between resolution and frame rate.
Starfield received a score of 9.5/10: “Starfield is an RPG that brings together the best of Bethesda's previous games with the best science fiction narrative about space that has ever existed. With elements of 2001, Interstellar and other great works, a space game has never been so grandiose and with such satisfying exploration as it is now. The team led by Todd Howard can be very proud of the fantastic work they have delivered.”
