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”
This is how games and drivers have been for decades.
There are huge teams at AMD and nVidia who’s job it is to fix shit game code in the drivers. That’s why (a) they’re massive and (b) you need new drivers all the time if you play new games.
I read an excellent post a while ago here, by Promit.
https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/5215019/
It’s interesting to see that in the 8 years since he wrote it, the SLI/Crossfire solution has simply been to completely abandon it, and that we still seem to be stuck in the same position for DX12. Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
I’ll give a different perspective on what you said: dx12 basically moved half of the complexity that would normally be managed by a driver, to the game / engine dev, which already have too much stuff to do: making the game. The idea is that “the game dev knows best how to optimize for its specific usage” but in reality the game dev have no time to deal with hardware complexity and this is the result.
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
People figured out the performance issues with Starfield when it was first announced: the Bethesda logo
