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.
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.
“I had to fix your shit in my shit because your shit was so fucked that it fucked my shit”
As far as wedding vows go, they’re not the MOST romantic… 🤷
As far as I know that’s what graphics drivers do, like, all the time. Every major title is handled specifically. I am not a developer. I heard this from engine developers
They released on two different platforms. PCs have so much variation in hardware, it’s not surprising there are issues with it.
It’s poorly optimized code, and the comments from the top brass has been “lol your PC sux” when they can’t even get it running right on their own hardware.
It’s not the variations of PC that’s the issue, it’s a design and quality control issue. Direct X and Vulkan are the bread and butter of PC gaming. Microsoft developed direct X to establish a common graphics framework for Windows and Microsoft game studio still fucked up working with it.
common graphics framework for Windows
They could have picked Khronos’ APIs. They think they are smarter than everyone else including GPU developers.
This is just classic corpo shit, developing their own proprietary stuff when no one asked for it. Apple with Metal too. Then it falls on developers to write abstraction layers
developer working on Vkd3d
I.e. graphics driver developer. Listen what he says, Bethesda, not many driver developers will point out where gavemdevs act stupid.
Typical Bugthesda. Am only wondering how did they get this big by only releasing buggy products. I can’t for the life of me remember a single product they have made that wasn’t buggy mess that community fixed for them time and time again without any compensation. Not only that community didn’t get any compensation, Bethesda tried to sell their work and pinch some more money.
Imo, despite the bugs and sometimes because of them, they’re really fun games.
Yet larian constantly gets free passes.
Any serious bitching about SF seems to me to be nitpicking from folks who were just looking to bitch at Bethesda. It’s a fantastic game with minor issues that are easily overlooked and don’t really affect the experience.
Because Larian is relatively small compared to Bethesda and the game exceeded the already high expectations, it’s a AAA D&D 5e game, which is something people were looking for for a long time. Larian deserves it, and they are actively fixing the game anyway. Bethesda has no excuses to be releasing games that have the types of bugs that they do after having such giant successes like Skyrim. They have the money.
Look I like the game so I’m not trying to say it’s bad in any way but you are just making excuses. Pent up demand doesn’t excuse the bugs. Fuck, they didn’t even need to develop the underlying systems, they already have 5e and the engines.
I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying that Larian deserves to get a free pass on this one for releasing a game that exceeded the already high expectations, not for the demand. And personally, I barely encoutered any bugs in a 90 hour long save…
As for them “already having 5e”, that’s true, but it’s a system that is rather complex and which only gets more complex with higher in-game levels and items which all slightly modify the game - which is easy on tabletop, but I can only imagine what a nightmare it must be to implement this in a computer game. And as far as I know, there aren’t any other computer games that truly implement 5e. Sure, there’s Solasta, but that’s highly modified.
As for the engine: I really don’t see it as a valid point, as they had to massively change and upgrade it between D:OS2 and BG3 anyway, it’s just too different.
I’m up to about 150 hours in BG3 and I don’t think I’ve seen a single bug.
I use a Mac and I’ve seen plenty, apart from us being forgotten and the release date pushed back silently twice. For me any dirt ground textures never render.
Larian does a much better job than any other studio, but I paid for the game to play in August at release with my friends, but then they silently dropped the release date and the only viable solution to playing was to pay for GeForce now and stream it.
I’d only be a little annoyed if they communicated their issues.
BG3 was basically unplayable for us for about 2 weeks post 1.0
But also, we really wanted to only play co-op, and the bugs were mostly online related, which is arguably more forgivable.
But still, hard crashing or freezing every 15 minutes for one of the three of us sucked, and looking at support forums, wasn’t uncommon either.
👌👍
Looks like Hans implemented a workaround in vkd3d-proton 2.10, using the open-source AMD vulkan driver on linux (RADV).
Device generated commands for compute
With
NV_device_generated_commands_computewe can efficiently implement Starfield’s use of ExecuteIndirect which hammers multi-dispatch COMPUTE + root parameter changes. Previously, we would rely on a very slow workaround.NOTE: This feature is currently only enabled on RADV due to driver issues.
I don’t imagine it will take long for this to make its way into a Proton experimental release. Folks with AMD graphics who are comfortable with linux might want to give it a try.
I’m amazed that Bethesda has one of the premier game developers in their stead in id Software and didn’t bother to just use their shit. Instead they actively chased their staff away.
Well the Creation Engine and the ID Tech Engine follow two completely different main goals: One is build for wide open spaces and exploration with real time physics while also guaranteeing mod support. The other is build for fast paced combat in closed level structures. And I think especially the mod support is important to Bethesda and its community. That’s also the reason why so many people stick to Minecraft java instead of the more performant bedrock edition.
As usual, it takes free labor for Bethesda to get their shit working the way it’s supposed to. What a garbage developer.
If this is such a big issue then Bethesda should make it a top priority to fix it, it does sound like a complicated issue though.
Do we know for sure that the Starfield devs weren’t able to figure out the problems with performance? I find often with companies, the larger they are, the more bureaucracy there is, and the more prioritization of tickets becomes this huge deal, where you even end up having meetings about how to prioritize tickets etc.
I would be surprised if the devs didn’t know what was wrong already, I think it’s more likely that management and higherups doesn’t care about them fixing it right now.
Game devs have many teams all with different jobs, for a big game like this you’d typically have multiple teams dedicated to optimization in different areas (and between them). The specific problem in this case was how the game was communicating with graphics drivers (among others), which for any graphics heavy game is very fundamental to performance optimization. The problems aren’t even an after-the-fact optimization sort of thing that teams should have to identify and follow-up on, batching jobs is standard practice when interacting with GPUs whether or not there’s a translation layer.
When the devs of a core translation API between two supported graphics drivers that are commonplace in the gaming ecosystem have to write code to specifically fix issues with your application you’ve done something fundamentally wrong.
People figured out the performance issues with Starfield when it was first announced: the Bethesda logo
No, Todd Howard doesn’t make mistakes, you just have to buy a more expensive graphics card!
/s
Todd Howard doesn’t do what Todd Howard does for Todd Howard. Todd Howard does what Todd Howard does because Todd Howard is… Todd Howard.
I’d assume an issue possibly at the engine level isn’t something that a mod can fix?
The end of the article seems to say as much. However, it seems the Vkd3d developers are trying to improve what they can.
if it run better on linux because of that i’m gonna laugh so much
deleted by creator
I love the bitching and whining over minor shit while BG3 gets a free pass for a massively buggy game 🤣
