Starfield PC players are having difficulty maintaining a frame rate of 60fps

PC players of Starfield report having difficulties maintaining a frame rate of 60fps, despite not being restricted by the same 30fps limitation as console players. While they can achieve and even exceed 60fps, many fans are disappointed with how challenging it is to sustain it, especially during combat.

Many are excited to enjoy the game but also believe that Bethesda needs to work on performance improvements for the PC. They are concerned that this version of Starfield is not well optimized and are dissatisfied with the graphical limitations they have to accept to ensure that the frame rate does not drop below 60.

"The community needs to be louder about the performance issues," says Reddit user MeneT3k3l. "It may be a good game, but poor performance can prevent many people from fully enjoying the game."

Currently, I'm not seeing enough feedback from the community regarding this issue. The performance is noticeably below the acceptable level for the visual quality of the game.

MeneT3k3l then links to some content creators who report their own struggles in achieving high frame rates at 1080p, despite using a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.

While the Starfield subreddit has been largely impressed with the game since the start of the early access period yesterday, many still agree in the comments that there is room for improvement on the PC. One user even mentions occasionally dropping to low 40s in terms of frame rates, an issue they haven't experienced with other games on their configuration.

"The truth is, the game doesn't even look good enough to justify this level of performance," says Eterniter. "I achieve higher frame rates when playing [Cyberpunk 2077] with maximum settings and ray tracing than with Starfield without any enhancements."

"I have a 4070/i910900k, and the game can barely maintain 60fps at 1440p with medium settings," agrees MrSloppyPants. "This is ridiculous."

As this is currently Bethesda's main priority, we can definitely expect hotfixes and patches for Starfield on both consoles and PC. However, at the moment, it appears that the developers made the right decision to limit the frame rate to 30fps on consoles. If these graphics cards are having difficulties, it's difficult to imagine that the Xbox Series X - and especially the Series S - will perform significantly better. When this was announced, it was a very controversial decision, but it may have guaranteed a smoother launch now that we've had time to become accustomed to the idea.

Overall, Starfield is proving to be a success among players. It has already garnered a large modding community, and some modders are releasing their own fan-based optimization solutions even before official patches are released.