Improving Starfield CPU Performance: DLSS 3, CPU Optimization, Best Settings & Min-Spec Testing

foreign [Music] welcome back to Hardware unboxed over the last two days we've taken an extensive look into how Starfield runs on a variety of graphics cards what impact each of the settings has on visuals and how to optimize performance in GPU limited scenarios but Starfield isn't just a demanding game on GPU Hardware it also hits the CPU pretty hard as well meaning that Gamers wanting the Ultimate Experience will need strong Hardware in all areas today we're going to be looking at a couple of things firstly how does Starfield run on the minimum spec CPU for the game amd's ryzen 5 2600x and what sort of experience you can expect from that five-year-old processor then we're going to explore what in-game settings can be tweaked to improve performance in CPU limited scenarios and finally we'll wrap things up with a discussion on what can be done about the CPU limit fingers crossed we can optimize The Experience somewhat for those struggling under the weight of starfield's CPU demands if we look at the system requirements for Starfield the minimum spec does kind of give away that the game is punishing on PC Starfield requires either a ryzen 5 2600x or Intel's core i7 6800k at minimum alongside stuff like 16 gig of RAM and SSD and gpus like an RX 5700 or GTX 1070 TI if we compare that to other demanding titles from 2023 we see that the typical mins spec CPU is much lower Star Wars Jedi Survivor isn't known for amazing CPU performance but its Min spec CPU is the ryzen 5 1400 and the same CPU is required for Hogwarts Legacy The Last of Us Part 1 requires a ryzen 5 1500x so Starfield requiring at least a 2600x is a hint that this game's CPU demands are higher than other recent titles so how does Starfield run on the 2600x I paired this CPU in my test system with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 3600 memory and a powerful Nvidia GeForce art tx4080 GPU to assess how it runs while CPU limited here we see some gameplay in new Atlantis a city area of Starfield and it's those cities that typically see the highest CPU demand in the game I'm running it at 1080p using ultra settings and there's a few interesting observations in terms of frame rate there's good and bad news the bad news is that the 2600x is mostly limited to around a 40 FPS average in the most demanding areas so this isn't a significant uplift over the consoles which are capped to 30 FPS there is also noticeable stuttering with this setup it's not a persistent stutter but I found repeatable stutters when transitioning between different areas of the open world as you Traverse the game and these assets need to load in the 2600x really struggles to keep up and stutters appear something you don't see on higher end CPUs which deliver a much smoother experience overall the good news is that despite being the Min spec CPU the 2600x doesn't average 30 FPS which would be a bit of a disaster as a 30 FPS average typically means drops below 30 FPS on a consistent basis and you never really know what a game developer means when they say Min spec CPU it can often mean averaging 30 FPS in the most demanding areas we did see performance dip to around 30 FPS or slightly below at times but typically you'd see performance above that the 2600x is therefore borderline playable for gamers satisfied with around a 40 FPS experience and yes 40fps is quite a bit better than 30 FPS in terms of responsiveness and smoothness there's also a few interesting observations to be made about GPU and CPU utilization here now these are rough metrics that don't always indicate everything going on in a system and don't necessarily reveal all bottlenecks but we can see that the 4080 is significantly underutilized on a 2600x at 1080p using ultra settings 50 to 60 utilization however the CPU also doesn't appear to fully max out at most we saw utilization top out in the 80 to 90 percent range usage is spread evenly over the cores and there's no one thread that is getting choked up to 100 utilization this can differ on other CPUs we've also seen some systems where individual cores do get maxed out and others that are more like this while there is heavy CPU utilization here and performance does improve with the faster CPU suggesting some sort of CPU limit it's hard to know exactly where the bottleneck lies is it single core performance multi-core performance cache memory front-end utilization alone doesn't tell us this and it's easy to fall into the Trap of looking at these numbers and thinking something is wrong with your system this may just be how the stats look in Starfield 4 CPU limit the situation doesn't change all that much testing the 2600x using 1080p low settings without upscaling the game is still CPU limited and you're unlikely to see much more than 45 FPS in the most demanding areas this doesn't bode well for CPU scaling across the various quality settings but we'll explore that soon with the minspec CPU you'll likely be CPU bottlenecked even with much weaker graphics cards than the 4080. this is how the game runs using 1080p ultra settings on an RTX 3070 in new Atlantis with this setup the game fluctuates between being CPU and GPU limited so any gpus below this sort of performance tier are likely to remain CPU limited while any upgrades over a 3070 won't improve performance if you're targeting 1080p low settings at a native 1080p without upscaling you'll need to drop down to around RTX 3050 levels of GPU horsepower to shift the performance limit from the CPU to the GPU even an RTX 3060 runs into the performance limits of the ryzen 5 2600x under these conditions so for those running budget Hardware you might find a CPU upgrade in this game is more meaningful than a GPU upgrade can anything be done to improve performance in CPU limited areas via adjusting settings well let's explore every setting in this game to find out tested using the ryzen 5 2600x at a native 1080p without upscaling the GPU used here is the GeForce RTX 4070 to avoid any GPU bottlenecks so we've upgraded a bit from the 3070 that we were using for the GPU video preset scaling is highly indicative of what is to come when CPU limited there is next to no difference in performance dropping from the ultra preset to high and just a five percent gain to average FPS when dropping to medium the low preset with fsr2 disabled leads to a 10 Improvement in average FPS and a 12 Improvement to 1 lows in this configuration though it doesn't do much to alleviate stuttering As you move between areas so even switching between all ultra settings to all those settings it isn't really going to transform your gaming experience when CPU Limited this is expected to some degree as most game presets are designed for scaling performance across a variety of gpus not CPUs it's much harder to adjust CPU performance using settings without sacrificing fundamental aspects to the game that affect gameplay or in-game systems and capabilities and clearly Bethesda aren't willing to do that where this leaves us is that for most CPU limited Gamers you're better off playing the game on settings that are as high as possible without pushing into a hard GPU limit and reducing performance if you have a capable graphics card increasing the resolution and turning up settings has little effect on performance under a CPU limit and you may as well enjoy higher quality visuals a big trap you can fall into is thinking that under a CPU limit with such mediocre performance you'll have to be playing on low settings otherwise you'll be crippled that isn't the case many settings will have no impact at all in fact on the ryzen 5 2600x the following settings can be cranked up to the maximum with no impact to FPS provided of course you have the GPU Headroom those are indirect lighting Reflections particle quality motion blur gtao quality contact shadows vrs and depth of field they all saw no impact to average performance and margin of error differences to one percent lows therefore when CPU limited all of these settings should be set to Ultra if of course your GPU can handle it what's also crucial to note is that resolution scaling has no impact on performance either this is Essential Knowledge as all Graphics presets use fsr2 with varying levels of resolution scaling but when CPU limited you are simply sacrificing visual quality by leaving resolution scaling on the low setting for example looks horrendous with its 50 resolution scale at 1080p like a disgustingly bad blurry mess but running fsr2 at 50 with the CPU limit makes no sense as it has no performance benefit so be sure to disable that some settings have a minor impact to Performance Shadow quality for example saw up to a four percent performance Improvement dropping from Ultra to low given this is one of the more demanding settings on the GPU it's possible this Improvement is largely due to reducing GPU load even if CPU work is a large component of overall render time reducing GPU work can shorten the time it takes to render a frame slightly and thus deliver a performance benefit from what we've seen previously in terms of visual quality CPU limited Gamers might want to explore using medium Shadow quality for a small boost to FPS I did see around a three percent gain to one percent low FPS when reducing volumetric lighting quality from Ultra to high I'd recommend doing this as it has very little impact of visual quality however it's a minor change that doesn't affect average performance to any significant degree crowd density is one setting that does improve performance under a CPU limit but the gain isn't substantial in the area we tested a three percent Advantage for using medium over High and a four percent gain for low overhigh with a six percent Improvement to one percent lows while GPU limited this setting only had about a two percent impact so it seems that this is one of the only settings that actually does reduce CPU load slightly while it does also reduce the amount of NPCs loaded into the busier areas of the game if you're desperate for more performance then turning this to low does make sense and it doesn't drastically alter the game's presentation just don't expect a massive performance jump I was also expecting grass quality to have an impact on CPU limited performance is often level of detail settings like this can reduce CPU load on Lower modes however most of the areas we found with grass and foliage are highly GPU limited so this setting makes little to no difference to CPU performance I think we'd only see a gain from a more General LOD setting that would reduce the number of objects rendered in City areas or perhaps cut down on draw distance but Garfield doesn't offer this setting at all and is partly why the quality settings do very little to address CPU limited performance ultimately for CPU limited Gamers there aren't many settings to optimize we'd recommend turning crowd density to low probably Shadows to medium and volumetric lighting to high then turning up every other setting as high as your GPU will allow while this won't affect performance all that much maybe a 10 gain at best at least you'll be enjoying a much better visual experience than if you had turned everything to low in search of performance or Worse still use the medium or low presets which set the render scale to 50 percent so if you looking to improve starfield's performance under a heavy CPU limit in demanding areas of the game the best option here is to cry because there are few if any options built into the game to improve CPU performance even if you want to sacrifice visuals this is an especially unusual as most games don't have many or in some cases any settings to allow it to scale across a wide variety of CPU Hardware but it does Sting the hardest when you get a particularly demanding game like Starfield aside from crying the next best choice is to drop a few settings in the game such as crowd density which do have a small impact on CPU performance outside of this we'd strongly recommend running every other setting on as high of a setting as your graphics card will allow this is unlikely to have any impact to CPU performance while giving you a much higher level of visual quality than if you decided to use all low or medium settings our GPU optimization guide will come in handy here and of course you do need to be somewhat careful as cranking things up too high will limit performance in areas of the game that aren't as CPU demanding Beyond this it might be time to start considering a CPU upgrade if you are running a minimum spec CPU like the ryzen 5 2600x you can get a substantial performance gain from upgrading to a ryzen 7 5800 X 3D on the same motherboard we'll be looking at CPU performance in an upcoming video but basically that upgrade should push the CPU limit above 60 FPS in demanding areas which is a substantial gain game is looking to Target over 80 FPS should be considering the very latest Hardware either ryzen 7000 or Intel's 13th gen one thing we have seen from past games is that setups with Nvidia gpus typically perform worse under CPU limits than setups with AMD gpus due to the additional CPU side driver overhead on Nvidia cards so at times Gamers playing CPU limited games could achieve higher frame rates from swapping out their Nvidia GPU for an equivalent AMD GPU in fact occasionally that would mean a much lower tier AMD card could outperform a much higher tier in video card is this a factor for Starfield no is the short answer at least based on what we've seen testing with the ryzen 5 2600x comparing footage from the GeForce RTX 3070 and Radeon RX 6750 XT side by side shows a very similar experience in new Atlantis certainly not a large performance boost on the AMD side like we have seen in some other games under similar conditions this suggests to us that nvidia's CPU overhead is not an issue in Starfield or at the very least it doesn't conflict with the areas of the CPU that Starfield stresses and ultimately limits performance another option to consider is adding a DLS S3 frame generation mod to Starfield if you already own a GeForce RTX 40 series graphics card it may not make sense to upgrade to a 40 series GPU to run frame generation in the game depending on how slow your CPU is a CPU upgrade may be more worthwhile but the frame generation mode from pure dark is an option albeit one that costs five dollars as this version of The Mod is not free like the dlss2 version we tested out the mod in demanding sections like new Atlantis on the 2600x with an RTX 4070 and frame generation does provide a noticeable gain to smoothness so if you're not satisfied with the fluidity of 45-ish FPS frame generation was able to bring us at least 75 to 80 FPS in most scenarios this will be similar if you have a CPU capable of around 60 FPS frame generation will deliver a little under double the frame rate and a correspond bonding gain to smoothness there are some drawbacks to this approach which is why frame generation is not the perfect solution to alleviating CPU limits on the 2600x dlss3 does nothing to remove traversal stutter As you move around the game the only way to solve that issue is a faster processor dlss3 also does not improve latency so if the reason why you don't like gaming at a CPU limited 45 FPS is the feel of 45 FPS frame generation doesn't improve this at adfps after frame generation Starfield still felt like it was running at 45 FPS and didn't have the same responsiveness as playing the game on a system that was truly capable of adfps without frame generation and yes I tried this side by side and while frame generation wasn't unusable or anything in fact the additional smoothness does improve the experience notably in my opinion it's still not as good as playing with a faster CPU that really delivers the responsiveness of a typical high frame rate experience if you want to hear more of our thoughts on DLS S3 in general and expand on all of that sort of thing our existing videos Deep dive into the technology and give much more detail the other issue with the frame generation mod in Starfield especially is the fact that it's a mod and it's not built into the game so there are noticeable visual artifacts that I spotted straight away issues that aren't normally present in the most optimized dss3 games we've tested so far there were a lot of issues with the Crosshair in generated frames plus other gobbling and sizzling at times this is exacerbated by in this situation the low native frame rate of running under a heavy CPU limit the lower the base frame rate is the longer each generated frame is displayed and the more noticeable the artifacts tend to be I suspect a deeper official integration would have delivered Superior image quality but there's only so much you can do and I would have hated seeing Starfield rely even more on upscaling and similar Technologies than it already does with that said Bethesda should still integrate dlss and frame generation officially Plus offer fsr3 support when amd's technology is ready in addition to continually optimizing over performance on both the CPU and GPU so anyway that's it for this video looking at Starfield CPU optimization unfortunately not a whole lot can be done for those who are significantly CPU limited we may see more mods in the future look to tackling some of these things I suspect there will be mods to reduce level of detail and draw distances and things like that which may even impact on CPU performance but generally speaking in games when you are CPU limited there's not a whole lot you can do should probably start looking at things like CPU upgrades and things like that so anyway if you do appreciate these videos and things like that then please do consider supporting us via patreon or floatplane links to those are in the description below if you want to see how CPU performance fares across a wide variety of CPUs in the game we will be back tomorrow with a full CPU Benchmark we've tested a whole range of CPUs so you can sort of have a look at where you need to upgrade to with your CPU to get the level of performance you may be after in those intensive City areas so anyway we'll be getting to that very shortly but for now this is it thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 149,305

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: wqFs1Auxo8Y

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/UkrainevsRussia2014]

Would have loved to see some other options like SMT/direct storage/resizable bar, CAS latency, ect. Maybe there is something that can be done to improve cpu limits.

[u/Jellyfish_McSaveloy]

Beta03 of the DLSS3 frame gen mod fixed the ghosting issues with the menus and the crosshair in my experience, but I have a 5800X3D which gives me a base of 70fps in New Atlantis. Might be a different story if you're using the mod at a lower base framerate.

[u/Practical-Canary8782]

" the best option is to cry" XD

[u/InHaUse]

Isn't it the case that most of the time when there's a CPU bottleneck it's because the game is only using 1 or 2 cores? In this game this isn't happening so what could be the issue?

I find it weird that a single player game can be so CPU bottleneck when games like Battlefield with hundreds of players and particle effects flying around can maintain above 100 FPS.

It's just wild to me that game optimization is still such a problem in 2023...

[u/vexedsinik]

Okay, lets get this out of the way:

1. AMD Bad and hatez gamerz.

2. nVidia is God Gift To Gamers.

3. something something power efficiency.

4. FSR3 will save the planet.

5. I bought two copies to save more.

6. Bethesdas Creation Engine is Garbage.

7. Something something No Citizens Sky Field is Apples to Grapfruit.

8. LTT.

9. But Tech Jesus said...

[u/bensam1231]

In the first test with the 2600x where they mentioned that the CPU isn't bound, it's definitely CPU bound. Even though none of the cores are at 100%, there is a combined utilization of two virtual cores of the same physical core that puts it above 100%. C0 79% and C1 72% would be 151% for a single physical core. The CPU is basically taking on extra work it otherwise wouldn't be able to handle without SMT/HTing and choking on it. If you turned off SMT/HT, I guarantee that you would see one or a couple cores maxed out at 100%. SMT/HT just milks the last bits of performance out of the CPU.

That why the GPU isn't at 100%. Not sure why people don't understand how HT/SMT splits up work. You'll only ever see SMT/HT virtual cores at 100% during synthetic benchmarks or something productivity related and the computer will basically be unusable if it gets anywhere close to it.

[u/Snobby_Grifter]

This was a strange game for AMD to partner with. AM5 cpu's don't really have enough infinity fabric bandwidth to deal with the massive dataset the game pushes through memory, so they lose out to most intel cpu using higher than 5600 ddr5 (L3 is only a band-aid here), and no frame gen means you can't absolve the cpu bottleneck any other way. Xess is a better open source alternative to fsr and runs about the same on the dp4a instruction set now, so nobody should be playing this game without the free uspscaling mod. The only thing gained here is the 7900xt/xtx outdoing the upper nvidia range, due to nvidia's terrible dx12 overhead.

Seems like a waste of AMD's money when when every other technology is extensively better for the game.

[u/LightMoisture]

I'd be curious to see their official numbers on DLSS3 latency. Seems off.

I just tested a 13900K/RTX 4080 for PC latency using Nvidia's overlay.

4K Ultra - 100% Render DLSS (DLAA) with DLSS MOD and Frame Gen.

This mod also includes Nvidia Reflex + Boost into the game, which by default is not there. This by itself, even if NOT using FG, lower latency from 25ms to 15ms average PC latency.

Then when you turn on Frame Generation, average PC latency drops from 15ms to 8-10ms with the corresponding large FPS increase in the one tested area. 70-103fps was the gain.

TLDR; Frame Gen and Reflex drop latency from 25ms to 10ms while fps went from 68 to 103fps.

Images look blown out because I'm using AutoHDR so screen caps look off and not how it looks in game.

DLSS 100% Ultra

DLSS 100% Ultra with Reflex + Boost

DLSS 100% Utlra with Reflex + Boost + Frame Generation

[u/RBImGuy]

New game engine would fix it