Starfield is a ‘bizarrely worse experience’ on Nvidia and Intel, says Digital Foundry

theverge.com:

By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.

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Starfield is one of the most demanding games on PC that we’ve seen recently, with even the RTX 4090 paired with AMD’s latest Ryzen 7800X3D just about hitting 60fps on average at 4K with all the settings maxed out. As reviewers and testers scramble to figure out why Starfield is so heavy, the experts over at Digital Foundry have discovered some obvious differences between AMD and Intel / Nvidia systems.

“If you’re on Intel and Nvidia you’re getting a bizarrely worse experience here in comparison to AMD GPUs in a way that’s completely out of the norm,” explains Alexander Battaglia in a detailed 32-minute tech analysis of Starfield on PC.

AMD is Starfield’s “exclusive PC partner,” with Bethesda and AMD engineers working to optimize the game for multithreaded code on both the Xbox and PC versions of the game across Ryzen 7000 processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics cards. As a result, it appears that Starfield is more optimized on AMD GPUs and CPUs than Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs.

Digital Foundry found that AMD’s previous-generation Radeon RX 6800 XT paired with Intel’s Core i9-12900K is around 46 percent faster than Nvidia’s previous-generation RTX 3080 on the same system. In my testing, I’ve found the RX 6800 XT can beat the RTX 3080 in a variety of games, but 46 percent is a far bigger margin than normal.

While average frame rates are lower with the RTX 3080 on this particular system, frame times — the time it takes for a frame to render — also take a