Starfield and Performance on Ultra Settings for a Geforce RTX 4050

 

Starfield on a GeForce RTX 4050

I have been playing Starfield for about two weeks now and I have to say that I am impressed with the game. It isn't prefect but no game is without its warts. This is a game that is made for people like me. I played Tie Fighter back in the early 2000s, and it was one of the best games that I have ever played. I remember after spending time with the controller and my hands would be sweaty and sticky. That's how much I love those games. 

This is the game for me. I know that some of the more experienced influencers out there do not like this game for various reasons, but I believe that Starfield is a game that gets better with time. It's a slow burn and one has to really dive deep into the game to really appreciate its story and many complex systems. It is unfortunate that people are having problems with this game, but I think it is one of the greatest games that Bethesda has ever released. In comparison with Skyrim, the world seems more realized, and the towns do not seem unrealistically small. 

One of the things about Starfield is that the game pushes the limits of gaming technology. Instead of playing it safe, they decided to push the game forward and make our computers howl; my computer most certainly started howling when began playing this game at high settings.

Of course, I wanted to be careful with my computer's capabilities, and not cause it to crash or overheat.

However, I wanted to see what the game looked like on Ultra settings and what the performance was like. Human beings are naturally curious creatures that dislike doing the same thing over and over again. I wanted to push my computer to limit and see how it performed and how the game looked on Ultra settings. For this benchmark, I decided to test it on Jemison on New Atlantis and the underground city known as the Well in the game. 

The Well is the poor mirror of New Atlantis and is generally a place filled with hungry and desperate people who have been forgotten by the masses above them. This area of the game is dense with NPCs walking around, yet it has a denser mentality to it. I really a big fan of places being full of people because that's how cities are in real life. There was something about Oblivion that was always somewhat disappointing to me; there was a lack of population in the Imperial City. Starfield makes the use of better computers and technology to give us more believable worlds that we can play in. Overall, my experience was that I was getting 50 FPS in the Well.

Where my computer really struggled was in the forest areas of the game. Whenever I had ultra settings, the game began slowing down to 20 FPS or lower, which is generally speaking less acceptable. When I turn the graphics down to High settings, the FPS is far more acceptable. I believe that Starfield works well on Ultra settings in a way that is quite surprising for a graphics card that is actually below the minimum requirements. 

There are many gamers out there that are unwilling to play anything at less than 60 FPS. I am not so elitist in my approach to video gaming. 60 FPS is a luxury that some of us are not able to afford and I believe that some computers are not just built out for high-definition gaming. 

My resolution for the game is at full HD and I would probably lower the resolution, but I do not want to have to keep changing the resolution every time that I enter the game. 

The video game automatically sets my settings at low, mainly because my graphics card is below the minimum specs to the 6GB of ram. However, according to research that I did on the graphics card on several benchmarking websites, the video card is actually stronger than the minimum spec card, which was the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 TI. That card came out in 2017 but as a desktop graphics card. Laptop GPUs have always been weaker than what came out on the Desktop. The hulking desktops have always been several years ahead of the laptops. With more space to put in hardware, the desktop computers are simply more powerful and able to render advanced graphics more efficiently. That being said, the GeForce 4050 RTX 4050 is a very powerful card in its own right and can run most modern games. It was only released this year and it can run Starfield but only optimally at low settings. 

I say optimally because, to some people, running a game at 30 FPS is unacceptable, especially to PC gamers. However, on the Xbox Series X, the game is locked at 30 FPS. Seems like to console gamers, they will have to deal with that, considering that that have less control of their own consoles. 

The game is playable at 30 FPS but less so at 20 FPS. That is generally the limit that I put when it comes to performance. 

Overall, this game works quite well on a Geforce RTX 4050, as long as you decide to run it at High and not Ultra.