Starfield fans might have found a solution to PC performance issues

PC fans of Bethesda’s latest game, Starfield, might have discovered a potential reason for the game’s lackluster performance.

Users on Reddit have been adamant about finding a solution to Starfield’s PC performance issues. Starfield, launched on September 5 for everyone, has had its launch marred by a series of technical and performance-related issues on PC.

However, some eagle-eyed users on the PCMasterRace subreddit might have found a partial source for the game’s performance woes. Of course, it won’t be the end-all-fix-all solution for every user, nor will it fix every aspect of the game. It will, however, potentially solve a massive issue to do with how the game speaks to the hardware via its code.

The possible fix comes from the codebase of the Vulkan port to Proton, Valve’s translation layer for Linux to play Windows games. Within the change log, the developer Hans-Kristian Arntzen, details issues with Starfield talking to hardware.

“With `NV_device_generated_commands_compute` we 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.”

Thankfully, someone on the same Reddit thread has explained it for all of us laymen.

Starfield PC performance issues might have a fix

Bethesda Softworks

Essentially, Starfield will send multiple instances of this ExecuteIndirect command to the GPU in your system. The information it is sending is incorrect and is causing the hardware to restart the process over and over. Once it does this, the backlog of commands begins to ruin the performance or cause crashes.

The fix might find its way into the full game in the future, but for now, it appears limited to this specific fork of code. However, the information shared is probably vital for manufacturers like Nvidia and Intel to figure out why the game isn’t running especially well.

Intel has had multiple problems with its new line of graphics cards, as the Intel Arc GPUs continue to face crashes during the game.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Todd Howard reiterated that the game is optimized for PC and that some users might need to upgrade their systems. Some on forums and Reddit have pointed out that even those with RTX 4090 and the latest CPUs are still running into issues.