Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield

destructoid.com:

With millions of players having already jumped right into the thick of it with Starfield, it’s hard to deny the fact that a non-insignificant number of them are facing performance issues on powerful PC hardware. When the director Todd Howard was asked about these issues, he responded in a way that some might say was tone-deaf. Notably, he said that Starfield was optimized and that some PC gamers might simply need to upgrade their rigs for it to run properly. A bold statement, to be sure, but one that may also ring hollow following some strange discoveries from the open-source community.

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. Arntzen did not mince words in his recent release, describing Starfield‘s graphics driver overhead as “very inefficient.” 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.

The performance inadequacies outlined above wouldn’t necessarily have been a huge deal had Todd Howard not recently gone on record claiming that Starfield runs great, considering its leveraging of cutting-edge tech.

Now, however, with the severe performance inefficiencies pointed out via Vkd3d, it’s clear this wasn’t the case. Arntzen’s work has revealed that Starfield does not allocate video memory correctly, and that it misuses an important DirectX 12 feature (ExecuteIndirect) to the point where the GPU needs to double-check certain bits of data, causing lower frame rate than otherwise might’ve been expected. The problem is then exacerbated due to